In the last couple of months, Chris and I have done an awful lot of furniture shopping to fill our new house. I expected this to be at least a touch more fun than it has been. The problem is that for the last 5-6 years, a truly strange fashion has taken over: distressed furniture.
If a person were distressed, no one could sell this as a good thing, but somehow pre-ruining your furniture seems to be loved by a large enough group of people that it’s everywhere.
I don’t care in the slightest what other people have in their own homes, but the trouble is, furniture shops only sell so many pieces. Most shops we went to had 80-90% distressed pieces when it came to anything other than sofas. Not all pieces were equally distressed, but given we didn’t want any level of it, we felt we had few options for our shiny, modern new house.
Basically, at this point in time, to have real options, you need to be willing and able to hire a carpenter to custom build you furniture. Given we just bought a house, want to backyard landscaping and so on, this hardly felt on the cards this year.
Instead, we have had to meticulously look at pieces to see if they have essentially been damaged on purpose. We had been thinking of buying a few really good pieces, the kind that last 20 or 30 years, but instead, have ended up opting for things that were OK and will likely last 4-5 years so that the fashion has time to change.
I am truly mystified as to why people like this. A lot of this stuff reminds me of my paternal grandparents’ furniture. They lived on a farm and like a lot of farmers, they didn’t have loads of money. Therefore their furniture just *was* old because they probably had a lot of it for 40 or 50 years. I have a feeling if they had been offered a brand new piece of furniture that looked as worn out as the stuff they already had, they would have thought the person was bonkers.
Distressed or just damaged?
Either way, I can’t wait for it to be out so I can buy some furniture I would genuinely want to keep in my house for the next 20 years.
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