Chair Love

Voila a Christmas gift—an old chair reupholstered!


This reading chair originally belonged to my great grandmother and was a wedding gift from my parents. It came to us in tattered blue fabric with bits of foam popping out here and there, and spent the last five years stored in a Michigan attic, lodged between boxes of Christmas ornaments and old cans of paint. A few months ago, hushed negotiations started behind my back: Justin contacted his friend Tim (who runs a textile design company with his wife) about selecting a new fabric. Then Just’s dad took the chair in to a Michigan reupholsterer, who—I found out later—was thrilled to work with Tim's merry fabric, since his usual orders involve variations on beige and tan.

This pattern is called “Feasting at the Berry Bush,” and reminds me of modern Swedish cave markings + the Garden of Eden (i.e. Sweden-Eden). If you go here and click on the new stuff for spring, you'll see a whole lot of products made with the same fabric.

With the new upholstery in place, the chair awaited Christmas morning (Justin’s whole family was in on the secret). After the blanket that covered it was whisked away, and I had exclaimed my happiness forty or fifty times, Just’s dad helped him carefully crate and pack it for the trip to NYC. Then we hauled the box into a Kinkos/Fed Ex store, where we heaved it high up into the air and down onto a comically miniscule scale better suited to weighing tea cups than 90 lb crates. Miraculously, it made it to our door in the Bronx two days later.

Ever since it arrived, I’ve been standing back and gazing at it, testing it out: it looks cute with cats on it and without. It doesn’t match the rug but that’s okay. Can I read Dostoevsky in a chair like this?

I also keep thinking about one of the papers I wrote last semester. It dealt with a couple of 19th century women writers, who, I pointed out, tend to fetishize the domestic space. By fetishize, I meant something akin to Marx's definition, that to fetishize an object is to value it beyond its utility. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, Stowe spends a breathless passage describing a character’s beloved old rocking chair, and how it is so wise that, my oh my, if it could talk, the stories it would tell!

While laying out my little critique of this kind of unhealthy chair-loving, I had no idea I'd soon be the owner of a wonderful old chair of my own. I was aware, however, of how much I (my unacademic side) love household objects, how much I obsess over them. I remember my great grandmother’s sugar bowl into which we dipped fresh rhubarb from her garden (she was the chair’s original owner!). I forget events and conversations but I have a good memory for trinkets and collections: glass frogs, china figurines, the sorts of things that clutter shelves and make dusting pointless. And bigger things, too: a wooden table whose sharp edges grew rounded by multiple coats of paint, a gold quilt I found at a garage sale when I was in college that I finally had to throw out after the cat peed on it one too many times.

These things sometimes seem more real to me than anything else, and I don't think I'm alone in this feeling. Even the weird popularity of chotzche and kitsch a few years ago—all those snow globes, religious candles and similar clutter—seems less a critique of sentimentalism than an embarrassed confirmation of our need to understand ourselves through accumulated stuff.

I say we need a new vocabulary to talk about our relationship to things. If I were ten and announced that I loved my chair, another kid my age would instantly holler, “Well, why don’t you marry it!” See? Back then we were already trying to figure out what it means to be attached to stuff.

Anyway, I am smitten with this chair, and hope that's not the sign of a character flaw or a frail constitution.

It's officially my new most favorite thing. What's yours?