(ARA) – Interest in the benefits and use of environmentally friendly products continues to grow, making the green movement stronger than ever. This is especially prevalent for homeowners who are looking to build and decorate their homes in ways that support the environment.
Furniture found at a traditional retail store is often mass-produced and shipped half-way around the world to be manufactured and then shipped again — at least once — before actually selling. Green-minded homeowners look for locally built furniture that is high quality and environmentally friendly.
“There are plenty of reasons why people are drawn to this furniture,” says Scott Ekman, vice president of marketing for Rockler Companies, the national woodworking retailer.. “More people are recognizing its environmental benefits as a way to set it apart from the rest.”
Besides requiring less transportation and energy-use, locally produced handcrafted furniture also reduces waste. Through a combination of higher quality construction and heirloom value, it tends to last longer, easing a huge burden on landfills and other waste management facilities. According to the EPA, furniture and furnishings accounted for over 18 million pounds of waste in 2006, about 3.6 percent of all waste in that year — the most of any durable good.
With the interest in green decorating increasing, sometimes there is a barrier for homeowners who don’t know where to go to find these types of goods. The Web site, www.woodworking.com/green matches furniture shoppers across the country with woodworkers and carpentry shops in their area.
“We recognized a big void in the furniture industry,” says Ekman. “Handcrafted wood furniture has huge potential, but right now it can be difficult to find. All we’re trying to do is provide people on both sides of the fence with more opportunities to get what they want.”
According to Ekman, that means more business for local woodworkers and more convenient options for consumers. “There are thousands of professional woodworkers out there creating amazing furniture,” he says. “And even more consumers who, if they knew it was available so close at hand, would love to buy it. This Web site is designed to bring the two groups together.”
Visit www.woodworking.com/green to find a location in your area.
Courtesy of ARAcontent
May 14th, 2008
“Recycle” seems to get all the glory in the reduce, reuse, recycle hierarchy. Who doesn’t love a story about plastic bottles being turned into baby blankets or a rug woven from bicycle tires?
But recycling involves some processing in order to obtain a raw material that can be turned into a new product. Reuse, on the other hand, simply redeploys an object.
So it stands to reason that “antiquing,” as furniture reuse is known in some circles, would be catching on now that green is hot and the economy is not. Yet local estate-auction houses, furniture dealers and consignment shops have experienced just the opposite.
“People just aren’t buying used furniture anymore,” said Redge Martin, president of Clars Auction Gallery in Oakland. His regional estate auction business used to do 40 to 50 percent of its business selling used furniture to dealers; that percentage is now down to 15 percent. “Used-furniture stores are going out of business,” he said.
Like many misfortunes, this one has a silver lining - for consumers.
“There are some screaming buys right now in antique furniture for the middle market,” said Lincoln Sander, executive director of the Antique Dealers Association of America. He said the slowdown in the midrange category is a national trend. “I’m not talking about masterpieces, but very nice-quality, solid and beautiful pieces. It’s cheaper than buying new furniture, and they have better-quality wood and workmanship.”
In the Bay Area, Martin said, the antique furniture in least demand is what he terms “average furniture: European and American furniture from 1870 through 1950.” The industry term sometimes used is “brown furniture”: heavy dining room and bedroom sets of dark hardwoods like walnut. Think French provincial, Mission style or Art Nouveau.
These days, Martin said, brown furniture languishes in shops at a fraction of the price it would have demanded even five years ago.
“A dining room set consisting of a table, six to eight chairs and a china cabinet used to fetch $1,000 to $2,000 at auction,” Martin said. “Now that same set is selling for $500.”
Even the fine china to place on those unsold dining room tables is a bargain: Martin said a Limoges china set that retailed for $1,000 recently sold for $100 at one of his auctions. A Louis XV-style bedroom set - including a bed, armoire and side cabinet - might sell for $400 to $800 now, half the price it would have garnered in the 1990s.
One big reason for the lack of interest: fashion. Julie Brown, of San Francisco interior design firm Re:Design, said: “Just like colors come in and out of popularity for design, furniture goes through cyclical demand. Victorian, Art Deco and French Provincial styles just aren’t as popular right now.”
Instead, the focus is on Modern furniture: “The ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s is the hottest market going right now,” said Jerry Goldman, of the monthly Alameda Point Antiques and Collectibles Faire.
“People are buying their childhood. Designers are snapping up the mid-Modern stuff.” Perhaps it’s the nostalgia of Baby Boomers looking to reconnect with the styles they grew up with.
Phyllis Long, proprietor of Ricochet Consignment in San Francisco, said, “We have a set of eight midcentury dining room chairs in the store that the seller is still pricing, and I have a waiting list of six buyers who want to know the minute they’re available.”
In the meantime, a seller recently came to Ricochet with an early American oak chest that he said other consignment stores had advised he burn rather than try to sell.
Technology has changed demand as well. “With the advent of wide-screen TVs that hang on the walls, antique armoires are just not moving anymore,” Long said, compared with the days when they were a perfect storage space for a television set.
Other dampers are the abundance of mass-produced furniture in chain stores and a corresponding loss of the tradition of valuing and understanding antique furniture. The long-treasured mobility of the American family means it’s easier to shop at Pottery Barn for a new china cabinet than to arrange the cross-county transport of one handed down from Grandma.
“Style used to involve owning things with familial value, knowing where a piece was bought and how it was handed down through the family,” Brown said. “These days style is something purchased from the catalogs that arrive in your mailbox every single week.” She adds: “People with true individual taste are few and far between.”
She prefers a more eclectic aesthetic, incorporating an antique Chinese cabinet and antique French chairs with her mid-Modern dining room table. “But an eclectic person has to be patient,” she cautions. “You have to be willing to wait for the right piece, to live in an empty house for a while until you find the right thing.”
It’s that loss of patience that pains Martin, whose auction gallery is a few miles from the UC Berkeley campus. “We used to have students coming here to furnish their dorm rooms with really nice, substantial furniture” that, with proper care, would last for decades after graduation. “Now they all go to Ikea so they can furnish their rooms in one shopping trip.”
Not that you should worry about the demise of the entire American antique industry. “The highest-end piece and masterpiece-quality antiques are still doing fine,” said the Antiques Dealers’ Sander. “In fact, it’s easier for me to sell a $300,000 piece than it is a $3,500 piece.”
Martin, too, has adapted his business strategy at Clars in response to the diminishing demand for brown furniture, shifting to more fine art and Asian pieces in his auctions, incorporating online bidding and reaching out to international buyers. “We’re doing well, in spite of how our furniture is doing,” Martin said.
More about used furniture Page G8
Resources
From consignment stores to antique shops, where to find good deals.
Finding the right piece
Be prepared to put in time as you shop and buy the piece you fall in love with.
Environmental payoff
Furniture typically isn’t recycled - it gets reused or it winds up in landfill.
Resources
Clars Auction Gallery, 5644 Telegraph Ave, Oakland. (510) 428-0100, www.harveyclar.com.
California Resource Recovery Association Reuse Council. www.crra.com.
Alameda Point Antiques and Collectibles Faire. www.antiquesbybay.com.
Antique Dealers Association of America Inc. www.adadealers.com.
Ricochet Consignment, 550 10th St., San Francisco. (415) 861-2570, ricochetconsignment.homestead.com.
Re:Design. (415) 346-0455, redesignsf.com.
When Modern Was Consignment Gallery, 1504 Church St., San Francisco. (415) 970-1030.
Nancy Davis Kho is a frequent contributor to Home&Garden. E-mail her at home@sfchronicle.com.
May 14th, 2008