Snake Essay 003: Why doesn't anybody have good furniture?

And why is everyone so mean and critical about it? A Snake investigation

Snake is a reader-supported newsletter covering good furniture, undervalued, or eternal. Many auctions this week—listings are at the bottom, as Quick Hits—but I wanted to talk about something.

One of the things I’ve mentioned in this newsletter but haven’t addressed directly is the concept of how no one really has any good furniture. Very, very few people, say, under the age of 45 have interiors that could withstand a photo spread. Fewer people have good furniture than good wardrobes… anything you read, open, any house you see… there’s never anything in there. Maybe people have good furniture out there… but we’re not seeing it. Really, nobody public has good furniture—and people just know about furniture. People’s furniture is behind what they know. Since these are possessions and ultimately meaningless, this is not a big deal. And I don’t have a big solution about this (well, I sort of do), or some sort of political explanation for why it’s happening. There’s no problem with anyone—anyone!—not having good, exciting memorable furniture, even if they are a furniture person and are critical about what other people have. Why should there be? They live in their own hell; we’re not at a debutante ball; we don’t need to impress each other; several other things are as important as furniture.

But let’s forget all that for a second. Furniture matters: we all have it, and what’s more, it’s in our homes. In our homes… It costs money. Not even the bad stuff is free. Most of it isn’t cheap either. Furniture isn’t a luxury. It’s a requirement. And with more people now vocal and educated about furniture—the good shit I mean—it’s now more relevant. (Good cheap furniture is a way out of part of the pathetic retail prison that enslaves many of us.) How big is furniture now? Pretty big. Opinions about design are no longer sequestered to specialized corners of media or among professionals in that field. It also goes viral sometimes. Furniture feels next… and yet, it’s still a little behind.

In other cultural arenas, tastes have matured. People, on aggregate, dress better now… mostly… and over the past decade, we generally all have slightly deeper and broader musical tastes. Furniture, though remains in the dark ages. Nobody knows anything. Literally nothing. But because we know about other things, we think we know about furniture. More concretely, what I mean is that writing discussing design lately—that N+1 piece above, the viral discussion around the sofa found on the street a few months ago—is modular. It’s not strictly about design per se but about specific things. Floors that are grey timbercore; an Amazon knockoff of some sofa which is inferior to the original. Or something else about ugly lamps. Or maybe they just focus, to me, too much on specific items that the authors find ugly. To be sure, media and social media exist mostly for people to complain and find fault in things. Which is more or less fine—everything bought and sold is fair game for criticism. But it all still feels catty.

I think… maybe the idea has to do with the blue couch. The one that went viral. It’s not a bad couch. It’s a fake, which was left out on the street, and which, for a while, people thought was real. (The real thing is a Roche Bobois.) It makes sense that the story went viral, because to most people, this is how furniture works:

Which of course it doesn’t. But it still kind of does. In reality, in the design world, just about everything out for sale either very expensive or ugly. But here was a real Roche Bobois, or something that looked like it, which runs in the five figures, and whose repros cost a couple of thousands, out there on the street… for free. Wild. It’s a bend in reality. As for the couch itself, it’s not bad. Not the best I have seen, but far from dogshit. It’s a get-me-over couch at the very least—even the fake one—that can do time, a couple years, maybe more, in an apartment, until the owner sacks up and finds, or spends, on the one they really want. More than that, the couch, once inside, doesn’t exist without context. It sits against the rest of the room. If someone buys it for cheap—better yet, if they find it—that is not a mistake. Even if the fucker is fake. It’s just a couch, nothing more, nothing less, something that everyone, even Bruce Willis needs, and something which has a budget, and, which if it’s bought for cheap, can be carried over to other things—more permanent and easier to transport design items, like a lamp or a side table that might last for a decade or two—or sundries, bills etc. So why all the focus on the couch itself? Furniture is always getting discussed without context—it’s always about a specific thing.

Which feels off. Discussing furniture in a modular way—brands, a specific provenance of something, a certain type of design aesthetic that’s over—feels very pessimistic, as if the author doesn’t have faith that the rest of the room might be any good. (Sometimes it is; sometimes the couch is the last piece.) One might say maybe a writer writing this way is assuming their bad furniture inflects other people’s rooms. But that would be negative. More concretely, it’s not a voice any one writer has, but which seems to be collective to the discussion: a sort of shamed, depressive tenor that assumes whatever furniture the subject owns isn’t as good as what’s presented online, or which is in stores, or which the writer—the reader, the subject—knows about and wants for themselves. It’s both shamed and knowing, a defensive posture that used to be bandied about in the fashion space, but which is not any more. No judgment here—it’s a competitive world. Complaining, now and then, beats out fake positivity. What seems more interesting is this massive lag between education and reality—between the furniture we see with our eyes, and the stuff we have in our homes*. It might explain why so much discussion about design seems to frame things as “not good enough.”

Things are critical for a few reasons, I think. The first is economic: rent is high, wages are stagnant, eggs are $8—furniture budgets are down. That one’s simple. People know about furniture but don’t have the cash to spend on it. Another is technological: design knowledge, though still zygotic, has spread widely the past few years, and many who knew about design early—but who didn’t pull the trigger in, say, 2021—may have seen prices rise. (A decade ago you could buy an Anfibio for a song; now you need $5,000 to get a Soriana. One asshole on Craigslist had a Wendell Castle chair that he wanted to trade for some power tools.) It’s a supply issue, too: there aren’t an endless amount of real blue Roche Bobois sofas listed out there. (They are out there but only a minority of them are listed because sellers don’t know people want them. This is a network effect thing.) But I’d say these factors only explain some of the problem.

Really, reality lags behind education because it’s harder to upgrade one’s furniture situation than it is to overhaul a wardrobe or a music collection. Furniture is not as suited to technology as clothing is, or, obviously, streaming media. And we’re in a technological age. Upgrading one’s couch is a logistical challenge and takes work—not a lot of work, but real work. Analog work.

It’s a shaky idea but it can be explained if we look at old jeans. We don’t see this negative, catty discussion today around clothing any more (used to be this way) because that market’s matured. I’ll explain… it’s a bit shaggy dog. Six, seven years ago, very few people dressed well. Skinheads did, many women, many urbanites. But many more people wore Fila sneakers with the shark teeth on them, or what LeBron wore during his Miami announcement… here and there there’d be exceptions. But it was mostly p. grim. A few years ago things began to change, and recently the standard seems higher. Not everybody dresses better now—one might say that today’s abominations are even more glaring, the smaller mistakes are more distilled, and the people on the wrong path will never comprehend how wrong they are—but on the aggregate I’d say style has vastly improved.

Some of this is the narrow focus of my own world… but this has happened, I think, because of vintage and Instagram. With Instagram, a person can see more outfits and people than they would on a regular day where they go to work and come home. Someone who uses Instagram “right” can see as many snappy dressers as a downtown Manhattanite on an errand run, or at a good party might: real examples that offer grounded and aspirational examples of how to dress. And vintage makes these advancements possible. Vintage itself has changed. A decade ago, its definition was narrow—old Levi’s, dressing like a miner or clown, rockabilly—but now it is broad. (All sorts of designer alleyways; ways of dress both significant and insignificant, and not always tied to subculture; it’s now less an aesthetic way of dressing than a shorthand for all clothing ever made, much of it out of season.) Best of all, it’s a cornucopia: there are more good vintage stores now, presenting a wider variety of items, and a handful of very good, deep p2p marketplaces. There now exists a universe of infinite, nearly endless, fairly unique clothing that’s cheap—compared to retail—and which is liquid. This last quality is what’s most important. Clothing now has velocity.

In the past five years, a critical mass of knowledgeable vintage consumers has developed, spurring these marketplaces, and so just about any vintage item of clothing that someone decides to buy they can sell tomorrow, or, depending how they price it, within a month or a week. The result is a new kind of clothing market, one not defined by devaluation drop-offs—buy a new shirt from The Gap, sell it, if you’re lucky, for $7—but by a permanent state of flux and upgrade. Sure, there are lots of mistakes; prices aren’t transparent, not everything can be-resold, and bubbles are everywhere. But for the most part, the market now is much different, and broader. Its ceiling is lower and its floor’s been pushed up. Clothes have been flattened: visually nondescript items that a decade ago were touted as grails, like, say, Big E Levi’s from the 1960s, are certainly worth as much now as they were. But they’re not as unique: they sit against other old jeans that are almost as good and quite a lot cheaper. Half as good, 1/77th of the price… it feels fair. Unlike furniture, there’s less of a gap between first-tier items and other very good ones. There’s enough pretty good stuff now to go around. On the aggregate, this, when done right, creates style (or at least good styling). Mostly, it’s about ease. Shopping—and selling—are nearly frictionless now, and stylistic inspirations aren’t as aspirational, or luxurious, but people here and there on the street. It’s become easier for people to make mistakes, rebound from them, tweak their styles and become permanent clothing hyper-consumers. From a consumer standpoint, this is probably how a market should work.

This isn’t the case though with furniture. We aren’t there yet. We don’t see as many impressive interior design situations as we do outfits, and it’s more difficult to buy and sell what we have, and upgrade, to get there ourselves.

Education: Nobody like I said has good furniture. But maybe we’re just not allowed in their homes. Some people have good furniture—actually, many people do. We just don’t see them. In what universe does nobody have any good furniture? Come on. It’s that…. it’s hard to find.

And we have expectations for this education to be frictionless. So there’s failure. To be sure, there aren’t as many archival accounts for old design or interior accounts that aren’t archival, nothing for Knoll like there might be for Prada. There are interiors accounts, but not enough, so many of them cast too wide a net. Other interior accounts (Nesting Doll is great) are archival, and so not as immediate in transferring over to our lives now. (Not that that’s a bad thing.) What’s missing might be snapshots of actual people, today, and how they live.

To be sure, there’s still lots of good furniture out there. Maybe not as many couches as jeans, but there is more than enough. There’s still a shitload of good furniture being sold every week on LiveAuctioneers, and there are good pieces, peppered in, on Craigslist and 1stDibs and other websites and on Instagram. But aside from LA, stock on the rest of the Internet can be stale. Instagram sellers love B-tier teak, and they don’t give it away; the same deluded asshole on craigslist loves re-listing his one Nelson bench. Beyond that, and more important, not everyone is into furniture yet. There isn’t a critical mass. People know a little bit about furniture, but really not much, especially compared to clothing. We’re in a zygotic or elementary stage. And so while someone who rolls the dice on old jeans can sell them off in a day if they don’t fit or look good, taking a chance on a couch is more risky. To be sure, you can sell anything pretty quick if you know what you’re doing—SNAKE does classifieds; if you’re in need, reply to this email—but, being honest, this velocity, for now, works best in big coastal cities. Some of this is logistical—you can’t store a couch in your closet; you can’t ship a chair to Louisiana for free. But really, it’s reps. Most of us are still groping at what furniture means, and we don’t really have multiple examples of a well-laid out house. So people rely on important brands, or something not being a repro, or criticality. Until there’s a critical mass, and the guy down the street has an Anfibio, we’ll all be digging around in a smaller, bogged down market, one without as much buying and selling as we’re accustomed to with jeans. And because the gold rush hasn’t yet happened, sellers are blissfully unaware. Items remain on the fence, and languish in the wilderness—some store in Ohio—and don’t get digitized correctly. Basically, they’re only out there for dealers. And so the pool of available furniture seems smaller than it is.

Which is wild. Because as far as other marketplaces go, we’re in a cornucopia. There is an endless amount of old jeans and shirts and designer dresses and hats and sunglasses and whatever else; more even now than a few years ago. There are records and stereos and gold chains and collectibles for days. I sold vintage a decade ago, I sell some of it now; it’s night and day how much more stuff, both good and middling, there is. Old clothing should be getting scarcer by the year. But it’s not.

Which informs how I think about furniture. I have a feeling there are warehouses out there, endless amounts of pretty good sofas and lamps—maybe only one warehouse full of Anfibios; but dozens more with Knoll and whatever else—rotting away/gaining patina in houses and basements in the midwest and the rest of America. It’s been like that with everything else. Why would furniture be any different?

But we still aren’t there yet. The question now seems less about how to create this bigger, speedier, much richer market, since it’ll reveal itself eventually. Like, it will. But in the meantime, it’s not exactly barren or static. There is way more furniture out there than any one person needs, and the plenty is in no danger of stopping. Just last month a trove of items that never go on sale in America:

Was listed. And went for cheap. I’m sure that once sellers see there is money in it, more new stores and dealers will begin doing better work, and will begin selling more good stuff, at affordable—compared to new retail—prices. But some of this rests on the consumer. Unlike vintage, this is not yet a frictionless market. Someone who wants good stuff has to do work.

But the work’s not that bad, and is not what needs fixing. It’s the attitudes that need to change. Maybe, if we want good furniture, we should build up a vintage approach: not the most expensive, best lamp, or the most envy-inducing, but a good one: a much higher floor than a ceiling. That means accepting what’s available on market as a way to build out a room, and then treating the item as liquid. A room doesn’t need every lamp, sofa, chair and end table in there to impress some invisible digital person; it just needs that every one of those pieces doesn’t suck. It probably also wouldn’t hurt if we started seeing more examples of real, working rooms: good interiors accounts, not aspirational, and not necessarily archival. Maybe one of my readers could do it.

As we wait for more accessible more north stars—practically, I’ve found these in old issues of Apartmento and on shelves at The Strand—there are still things we can do. One is I am not sure the extent to which I can wrap up everything that I said here. But I don’t think that it matters. There are still ways to advance. The main one, I think, is to be positive and assume more good crap is coming down the pike. It always is. You just have to know where to look. (Most people don’t.) Combined with work—slowly getting knowledgable about furniture; buying things on auction; using p2p sites—it can improve things. It may not be as easy to make a mistake with a couch as it is with a pair of jeans, but it’s only a mistake until the next one. After we upgrade, we can upgrade again. Advancement is one step down the line.

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Quick Hits:

• Gio Ponti Diamond silverware for Reed & Barton, Philly $1,500 (elegant)

• Gismondi ‘sintesi’ lamp for Artemide, $400, $65 shipping

• Jeanneret-style Kangaroo chair, CT, $425 (really good, even as a fake)

• Neil Frankel for Knoll ‘99 rolling chairs, CT, $200 (deranged, baroque design)

• Christian Ghion Driade flat candelabra, $50, $18 flat ship (striking)

• Harry Bertoia side chair for Knoll, brown, $50, PA (deal)

• Paul McCobb walnut desk, chair $200, in-house ship Atlanta (stately)

• Cini Boeri Voyeur screen for Pace, 5’6 tall, $550, NJ (she’s the king)

• Kartell componibili, table, $50, NJ (deal for just the compo)

• Sonneman bent chrome tub lamp, $150, NJ (perfect starter lamp)

• Piretti Planta coatrack (Castelli) $100 NJ (pictured; perfect; Lock of the Week)

• Sapper for Knoll office chairs, Hermès brown, $100 NJ

• Piero Lissoni for Kartell plastic lounge chairs, orange, $300, CA (really good)

• Driade by Yoshioka pop chairs, $125, IHS, CA (possible steal)

• De Sede style four-seater leather sofa, CT, $50 (nice cheapo)

Thanks for reading.

Snake

*not my home… for the record.