Here is a younger member of famille Lunchista who knows a good bureau (and a perfectly-dimensioned little place in which to pretend to have a kip) when she sees one. In fact a lot of our furniture, though not as venerable as this piece, are cast-offs, or heirlooms, depending on your point of view, from other parts of famille Lunchista and beyond. The desk at which Lunchista is typing these musings was a cast-off from our former next-door neigbours when they were re-arranging their older son's room. The chair on which I am sitting and (until it died on me, about 5 years after its expected lifespan I grant you) the computer on which I wrote, were cast-offs from the local University, who have periodic refurbishments to keep up with the expectations of today's high-maintenance students (though to be fair, yesterday's low-maintenance students had grants and didn't have to pay tuition fees).
We are not so much "people who buy their own furniture" (as Alan Clark once famously sneered about Michael Heseltine) as people who cadge it, or pick it up secondhand for a song and then choose a fine day to wheel it out into the yard, scrub it down and restore it to its former glory (or indeed to something else altogether).
Why do we do this? Well, because it makes for cheaper, higher-quality, more interesting furniture. Let me explain:
The "cheaper" part is kind of obvious. Unless you're going for a genuine Chippendale (I mean the furniture not the gentlemen in ties and cuffs), or a Ming dynasty vase or the like, older stuff simply costs less. The "higher-quality" bit needs a bit more explanation: bear with me while I conjure up an image of a bath-tub.
Thank you, Charlene Winter Olson, I hope you don't mind if I borrow it.
Imagine a tape-measure placed along the floor from left to right under the bath, with time on it, in years, instead of length in cm. The probability that anything you buy, from a car to a table, will develop a fault or give up on you in a particular year, follows a shape just like the profile of the height of that bathtub as you (or your pet spider: every bathroom has one) move along the tape measure underneath it. The flat bottom of the bath stretches along all the years when your purchase does well: your table is stable or your car doesn't break down. The gentle upward slope on the right represents more and more faults happening as your purchase gets really old and knackered.
But what everybody forgets, is that steep slope on the left. Brand new stuff is more vulnerable to everything from catastrophic design faults to bad manufacture, including something as simple as the shine wearing off. Older stuff has begun to "stand the test of time": if it's still shiny (for example), or sturdy, it is far more likely to remain so. The "Bathtub Reliability Curve" is a well-known story in engineering circles.
Add to that the unsavoury practice of built-in obsolescence that's been popular since the 1960s and you can see why older stuff is a better bet: it was simply built to last. Lunchista happens also to think that a lot of it even looks more stylish. But there's more.
Old stuff gives a place an extra dimension: the dimension of time.
Some people seem to go out of their way to avoid this, but you have to wonder, why? In China, where I've seen for myself that people generally have a massive preference for the new over the old, it's understandable. In a lot of cases the past would have been very painful (how does partial occupation, two wars and two famines in living memory sound?), and something about which people would probably rather not be reminded by their present everyday stuff. But here in the UK?
Sometimes if I walk into a place and everything's new, my first thought is: how very, erm, temporary. Where were these people 18 months ago? Is there something in their past that they'd rather forget, or even hide? If it's a business, will they just disappear? This actually happened once, after I really had thought that of a new workplace. We ended up with 90 minutes to clear our desks!
It all goes to show, without time, really, we are nothing.
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