Furniture shopping

Earlier this month, there was an article in The Washington Post on the shift in furniture quality that's been happening over the last couple of decades, a shift that has taken us from the once-in-a-lifetime purchase of solid (or at least solid-ish) wooden something or other to the more stylin' wares available from cool design emporia like Ikea and West Elm. 

Furniture isn’t what it used to be. Fifty or 60 years ago, people thought of it as something they’d have for life — a dresser that a grown kid could take to college, a dining table where future grandchildren would have Thanksgiving. Today? Not so much.

Modern consumers are often all too happy to ditch last year’s Wayfair shipment for whatever new trend is sweeping their social media feeds. At the other end of that cycle is an industry relying on cheap labor and flimsy materials to fatten profit margins and keep prices down. (Source: Washington Post)

The article on the what's and why's of design, manufacture, and assembly was interesting - or interesting enough to prompt me to do a mental inventory of my home furnishings.

My furniture sensibility can best be described as eclectic. 

My "stuff" runs the gamut from "heirloom" (ahem) pieces that came from my grandmother; to highish-quality solid cherry pieces from Crate & Barrel, Pompanoosuc Mills, and Heartwoods (now, alas, out of business); to middlingly decent quality pieces from Circle and Ethan Allen. (Believe it or not, Ethan Allen - the place that furnished much of my childhood home - no longer specializes in faux colonial maple. Their style now has style. Whodathunkit.) I also have a ration of odd-ball pieces acquired over the years.

From my grandmother - my heirloom collection - I have a

couple of lamps and mirrors, and a nice solid mahogany claw foot side table (which I had professionally refurbished years ago). I also have a cheapo, flimsily built mahogany veneer desk and chair that, wobbles and all, I'm rather fond of.

My favorite Nanny piece is the chest of drawers that my father and his brother Charlie shared during their childhood. The main parts are solid oak, but the back is a scrim of wood that's one step above cardboard. So much for the super-duper high quality furniture of yesteryear. 

Nanny was a great modernizer, and, when I got this oak chest - nearly 50 years ago, when my grandmother moved out of her house and in with my Aunt Margaret - I had to strip off a good half dozen coats of paint - white, green, pink - spending hours that summer in my mother's backyard with zip strip and steel wool. To finish it off, I used an all-in-one finisher, but it still looks pretty good after all these years.

Another Nanny piece I had for a while was a brass bed, which would have also been cool if Nanny hadn't sawed the headboard off, and swapped the shorter and less decorative footboard into service as the headboard. The footboard then featured the raggedly sawed off headboard. Like the oak chest, the brass bed had also seen many coats of paint that I had to strip off. I didn't use the Nanny bed for very long, and it languished in my mother's basement for years before being junked.

Instead of the ratty brass bed, I sleep on a solid cherry sleigh bed (Crate & Barrel), which I inherited from my sister Kath by way of my sister Trish. Other than in my father's oak chest, I keep my clothing in a couple of nice solid cherry chests, and have a nice solid cherry bedside table. 

I also have my mother's hope chest, c. 1945, and - something I always wanted in my room as a child - a comfy armchair and hassock. I got mine maybe 40 years back at the late lamented Jordan Marsh. It's a medium-tone blue, but for 30 of those years I've had it, it's been covered with a bespoke slipcover, blue-green-yellow check. So unless I want to rid myself of this chair, I'm limited to using blue-green-yellow as my bedroom color scheme. Fine by me. The walls for the past decade have been light blue; prior to that, they were pale yellow. (By the way, in my fantasy, I would use that comfy chair to read in. Mostly it's holding books and magazines that I haven't yet gotten around to.)

My miscellaneous pieces include a lyre-backed chair of my mother's, and a mahogany China cabinet I got at an antique store. I use it for my CDs. I have a chair from my Aunt Margaret's dining room set. And I also have (among other bookcases) the bookcase from my childhood bedroom. It was made by Mr. Porter, father of my parents' friend Marge Porter. It has solid wood sides and shelves, and the backing is beadboard wainscotting from when the Porters modernized their kitchen. The bookcase has seen a lot of paint over the years. In its current incarnation, it's off-white, with the beadboard a sage green.

When I reno'd my condo in 2015, I got new living room furniture. Since then, I've made two purchases.

In November 2016, the weekend after the election, I realized that I was going to need a truly comfy reclining chair to get me through the next four years. So I went over to Circle Furniture, and before I knew it, I'd paid about triple what I went in there intending to spend on a truly comfy reclining chair. But I still need it, and amortized over the years, it's been well worth it.

At some point during covid, I got sick of looking at the mahogany, c. 1925, dining room table and chairs that my husband and I got at an antique dealer about 40 years ago. I was never all that wild about it to begin with, and the chairs - which, admittedly, I had never polished - were beginning to crack every time someone sat in them. 

My friend Joe's niece has a c. 1925 house, and she's a furniture refinisher, so was delighted to get the table and chairs, making way for the more modern cherry table that replaced it. The cherry isn't solid, but it's pretty nice, as are the blackish stained chairs. (I kept the mahogany credenza.)

Unless I need something new when I downsize and move to my one-foot-in-the-grave final accommodations, that table and those chairs are likely the last furniture purchase I'll ever make in my life. 

Sigh of relief: I don't have to worry about putting together anything from Ikea, or whether something that looks nice but is rather cheapo from Wayfair will survive me.