Ornae Archives
Testing hard disks on Mac OSX
the emergent property seems to be crap
Apple's iDisk network traffic is encrypted
Boneless country ribs, experimental recipe,
Humans, natural organizers to a fault...
All across the changes in six throws.
Political labels, meaningless?
The writing zealot has a new friend, and some silly sentences...
Lily Allen: chirpy brutality. Nice work if you can do it...
Trance, downbeat, brazilian, funk, and jazz? That's a genre?
An obsession with flags
Afraid of "Big Government"?
Curated computing", WTF?
Fire under mountain, PI/Grace
hearts's desire
Finally, sensible thoughts about terrorism from a bomb disposal guy who should know.
On Apostrophes
Who wants an overgrown iPhone?
Christians and creationism.
decision
new rule ... no more throwing bears at people.
Drowning
She was looking for "The Door Into Summer"
..under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world...
On community...
On time...
On Spelling
The History of Tolerance
Motives
...The tug of the future. The reason you tried...
...political posturing gone horrifically awry.
...and she was determined not to be afraid.
...finite horizons of predictable problems and predictable joys...
...There is only a gradual wearing away of the sharp edges...
Code as literature, the most important element of style
Deconstructing Wall Street Newspeak
Requiem
Fake Steve Jobs, backfiring?
DRM, Denial of Rights Management
Bill O'Reilly, John Edwards, and racial slurs.
The widening economic disparity
Oh man, here comes Rita
Katrina slams New Orleans. Is There Blame?
Apple users have another tempest in our teapot.
Carving up trees as therapy.
If a tree falls in a hurricane, does it make a noise?
Torturing your customers, A Business Model
What! Bean mush again mom?
Automatic poetry on eBay
Flaming on Miami Beach
Cautionary tale
It won't die Jim!
Fresh Timber
More on Music
Almost Worthless Music
E-Commerce
Formalisms, Frames, Footstools
The Opposite of Minimalism
Lots of Photos
Repairing breaks
Beasties
Period influences
Sweat shops and consumer goods
Galloping furniture
Calm Interiors
Ode to Keith Haring
Good junk
Broken chairs
Floors in Florida
Shoji in America
About Ornae
Good junk · Friday March 12, 2004
We spend a lot of time in antique and thrift stores, trying to see the real bones of furniture through the godawful walnut stain and pink oak pickle. We look for furniture with architecture, furniture with grace of line, tough furniture which stood fast against the worst that little billy could do. This is the furniture that we spend weeks refinishing into some strange table creature, half alive, ready to gallop into the kitchen.
And we love lightweight, shipped-unassembled furniture. We think Target sells a lot of great furniture. (we draw the line at Walmart, but that’s a union thing) We love Ikea.
We’re not so fond of “Fine Hardwood Furniture”, as offered by most american furniture stores. It’s often of incredibly poor quality, though expensive. If it is made of hardwoods and not MDF and veneer, it’s actually a bad thing since veneers are much easier on the forests than hardwood planking.
So how do these positions all fit together?
A lot of it is about value. We just don’t see spending a lot of time or money on stuff which is only good enough. Being frugal also means never throwing anything away until you’ve absolutely used it up, can’t be fixed, and you’ve scavenged it for parts. We’d rather spend love on an old piece than money on a new one. When we’re done we’ll have something that’s unique and special, exactly right.
Some of it is ecologic. If you must make new furniture, it’s much better to make it out of leftover sawdust than fresh cut rainforest. There’s the valid question of whether the binders and glues used in fiberboard and MDF are too poisonous, perhaps we shouldn’t allow new furniture to outgas near our children. But it’s almost impossible to buy new furniture at any price that won’t be oozing mysterious organics into the environment for a few years.
We like lightweight furniture when we can get it, because it meets both of the criterion above. Lower material costs, lower shipping costs, easy to move, store and re-purpose. This is Ikea’s whole design philosophy, furniture that has minimal economic and ecologic impact.
So our homes are these strange mixtures of ultramodern and ancient. The Pergo floor under a victorian rocker. The Arne Jacobsen chair next to an Art-Deco buffet.
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