Ugly Furniture Store- Beautiful Solid Wood Furniture

5-7-13  Tues.

Yesterday afternoon, Leona’s cousin drove us to the furniture store her mother urged us to visit. She learned of it through her boyfriend who had his home furnished by and is friends with the owner of the furniture factory of which this store is a wholesale outlet. I felt like I was in a fantasy land where your greatest furniture dreams all come true! By the end of our visit, our host, the wonderful lovable salesman /manager had to tell us to calm down and not order too much furniture just like a medic at Woodstock would tell a hippie to lay off the Purple Haze for a while until he comes down. When all was said and done, the tens of thousands of dollars we would have to pay in America for the furniture we bought!

      The first item we looked for was an entertainment center, a long low table on which to place the flat screen TV, DVD player, and iPod player. Later on when we retrieve it from Brooklyn, we will put Bose speakers on it and, under the top, a record turn table, amplifier, and CD carousel. We found a beautiful 83” long solid chestnut wood entertainment center.

      The second piece we looked for was a coffee table. We found a solid beech wood coffee table, about 4.5’x3’ (I was too excited to measure it then) with open bottom shelf of slats. It came with the third piece, a matching 3’x3’end table which we could place opposite the front door between the sofa and concrete beam that divides the living room from the dining area. On it we could put the figurine lap we have on our marble table in Brooklyn.

      With those items chosen from a selection of a dozen others, we were led upstairs when we said we also needed a bed. Low and behold, at the top of the staircase was a selection of five of the very brand and style of bed that we love in our bedroom in the Beverly; Roberta Colum VAL International Japan, and we purchased the king-sized 6’x6’ mattress and headboard. We left the bottom mattress out, it being overpriced and irrelevant to the comfort of the upper mattress; a custom made baseboard instead . I don’t have the receipt with the price break-down but I believe we paid around $1500us for what would be a $5000us mattress set in Bloomingdale’s in New York City!

 It was so ironic that the day before, after Leona couldn’t find a showroom for the mattress we liked, we found a full showroom in this nondescript warehouse showroom that we had thought wouldn’t even have any of the furniture we wanted. It turned out to have it all and better than either Leona or I even imagined it would be.

With the solid wood entertainment center, coffee table, end table, and mattress set, that would have been enough to call the day successful, but there was more, and the icing on the cake, indeed! A beautiful, beautiful solid wood (some Japanese wood that the salesman/manager didn’t know how to translate into Chinese nor English) 52”x26” desk with fragrant cedar drawers. And that wasn’t all! There were two matching 35”wide x15”deep x77” high sold wood (same Japanese unknown wood source) bookcases, with glass doors, drawers, and such lovely lines and features, the desk and these bookcases would look natural in the office of the president of Harvard University! And here is the amazing thing about all of these purchases. The one, two, three, four, five, six, seven pieces of furniture and mattress set could be had for a meager 108,000NT ($3,600us) what would have cost at least $25,000 in New York!!! It is hard to believe that we can see this wonderful workmanship in our home, daily!