Furniture Frenzy!!

I have a new favorite furniture store -- which is not to say I have an old favorite furniture store -- we don't buy furniture. We're artists... we don't walk into stores and point at $1400 sofas and say "I'll take it." Noooo, among my people, sari fabric draped over parents' hand-me-down sofas is a "new sofa." Well, until now...

The new favorite furniture store is Cargo, in the Pearl District. It's a warehouse filled with antique chests and benches and puppet theaters from Java and Bali and China, with parasols and lanterns and dusty rugs, cabinet beds and trays and beads and old rusty gates and pieces of houses that we must imagine, have finally fallen over on some backstreet of Surabaya or Jombang. I went to Cargo by mistake a few weeks back when I was hunting for a glass shop to buy glass for my mosaic table, and I walked in and almost had a heart attack. I wanted to call Jim, but as usual my cell phone battery was dead (I just can't be bothered plugging that thing in) so I had to wander around gasping like a fish, like a furniture-loving fish. I have never really been into Asian style. Not for me, the fu dogs and shiny busy Chinese ceramics. But our trip to Turkey (mentioned in my last post) instilled in us a love for the gypsy caravan look of Turkish rugs and peeling chests of the Near East, and Turkey is as near as the east gets, of course. But now, my love has extended to Indonesian antiques.

Pictured above is our adored new "bench" from Bali (bench is such an inadequate term!) -- you see, Jim gasped like a furniture-fish too when I dragged him into Cargo a few days ago and agreed we needed to adopt it immediately into our loving family, and after wrangling this piece of solid teak massiveness into the back of the truck and barely BARELY squeezing it through the front door, it is presiding over the living room in quite a queenly fashion. As Alexandra has been known to do with her beloved leather armchair, we are still in the phase of sitting in the old sofa so we can LOOK at it, rathing than actually sitting ON it. And you can't really grasp the size of the thing in the photos, but when I sit on it, my toes do not reach the floor!!

I also went a little crazy and bought a cool old Indonesian porch pillar for the corner of my writing room (the work is progressing in there!) to hang lanterns off of or something, but now I need to revert to the old ways of not buying things, and try to forget this little mania that overcame me. Not buying things is a pretty easy habit to maintain, when you're a starving artist, but buying things can become a habit pretty easily too, when you become less starving. I think we're furnitured up for the next little while!