Furniture Decisions

The furniture decisions you are making now depend on where you are in your life. Just starting out? It may be brick-and-board bookcases for a while—time-honored orange crates have become collector’s items and are too pricey for the dorm room. Or you could just go crazy at IKEA. Putting furniture together is good for you. Gotta use those opposable thumbs for something, right? Maybe your ship has come in and you want to get the good, expensive stuff, like your grandmother had, you know, furniture in suites, with matching drapes and cushions. Then again, maybe you’re downsizing and you won’t be needing the fourteen-foot dining table and the hutch that holds enough dishes for an army.

Happily, there are more furniture choices today than when you could only choose between ‘colonial’, ‘French provincial’, or ‘Swedish modern’. You could tell a ‘colonial’ piece; it had ruffles. It had turned legs. It was some shade of brown. ‘French provincial’ was curvy and was blue; sometimes blue and white. ‘Swedish modern’ looked uncomfortable and was very, very orange. In the kitchen was a formica-topped table that would fetch a ‘retro’ fortune on eBay. Today we’re lucky to have such a variety to choose from, so many options, so many ways to shop. Where there once was the Sears-Roebuck catalog we now have the Ethan Allen wish book, the IKEA catalog, and all of the internet for our shopping. Who knows, we might even go crazy and walk into a furniture store! Furniture is available all around us, from free couches on the sidewalk at the end of the semester, to a custom-made couch that can set you back the price of a small house, everywhere from thrift stores, antique malls, craigslist, and the local penny paper. Don’t forget the pass-around stuff between family and friends.

All the rules have been chucked out of the window since we discovered the word ‘eclectic’. Unless you’re a museum curator or a set designer, you are allowed to mix up historical periods and nobody’s going to wag their finger at you. Yes, you can put an Edwardian piece next to your Queen Anne chair if you like. That’s the point; if you like it. We seem to be going in two directions at once. On the one hand, some of our furniture pieces are so huge and clunky (have you looked at the stuff at Costco lately?) that it seems to be accommodating our national obesity. Beds require ladders to get into. Everybody seems to want an enormous bed frame made out of multiple tree-carcasses. On the other hand, some of our living spaces are so small, we need to find dual purpose pieces. Our electronics are shrinking. The computer no longer needs to dominate the whole room, and a home office can look (and work) exactly like a very pretty living room once you close the door of the office armoire.

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