Before You Have a Seat, Take a Stand
He Says: 'Cool!' She Says: 'Cool It!' Can Modern Love Survive a Tale of Two Chairs?

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 4, 2007

On Sunday afternoons on 14th Street, up by the art galleries, barrel chairs are like a litmus or Rorschach test for couples who just moved in together and are buying furniture. There are a lot of these couples in Washington.

"You know what they look like?" Annette Schulz asks. Along with her fiance, she is shopping for a lamp in a somewhat hip vintage furniture store called Hunted House. It's the kind of store where somewhat hip people with fiances buy furniture. "It's like someone took a trashy 1970s car seat, maybe one used in a porn film -- or not a porn film, but at least in 'Magnum P.I.,' you know, Tom Selleck with the mustache -- and then just put it together with a pirate movie. That's what they make me think of."

If the barrel chairs are ugly, they are ugly in such a surpassing way that they may, in fact, be hideous. They may be so hideous that they become their own personality quiz:

Q: What kind of person are you?

A: The kind of person who would buy these chairs.

Then again, they may not be ugly, they may be something else, but very something else.

They are made of barrels, so mocking them could be as easy as shooting fish in them.

The mid-20th century upholstery is vinyl -- black, covered in harlequin diamonds of red, orange, teal, russet, gray, white, emerald and lemon. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Chair. The legs are stubby. The seat swivels.

My boyfriend loves them. In a desperate attempt to understand why, I bring in a second opinion in the form of a Dad visiting from Denver. Dad sees the chairs, says, "Holy Mother of God, those are really ugly chairs." So Mark Johnson, the owner of the store, comes over. "Ohh, you're from Denver. Yeah, I can see how these chairs might not work in Denver. In New York or Los Angeles, yeah, but not Denver."

Dad's like, don't go dumping on Denver. He says: "These would totally sell in Denver. Daughter, buy the chairs." I don't. If they are still there by the boyfriend's birthday in December, I will.

Hunted House has cool stuff. Like a three-cushion Danish modern sofa in cheerful plaid. A crushed-velvet lounger in buttery gold. A mint-condition tiki bar with matching stools. It also has two barrel chairs.

Let's say that barrel chairs are "a taste." Once, cultured people had good taste and everyone else had bad. Then philosophers came up with aesthetic relativism, which says that the assessment of beauty is relative to individuals, cultures and contexts, so everyone had to shut up about everyone else's taste and even invent a phrase ("there's no accounting for taste") to keep the peace when it came to things like barrel chairs. Taste is like coffee: Everyone knows someone who makes bad coffee, but miraculously, no one is that person.

Things can qualify as good taste if they are vintage.

Vintage in the dictionary means "of old, recognized, and enduring interest, importance, or quality." Vintage turns a barrel chair into "a piece." As in, "This is a vintage piece." Vintage pieces transcend tackiness, kitschiness and the category that made Susan Sontag famous: camp. Vintage would put these barrel chairs at the same level as wearing Converse All-Stars and Buddy Holly glasses -- if only one knew for sure that they were vintage, and not just barrel chairs. Lesser doubts have doomed 14th Street relationships.

The inter-couple psychodynamics also include guilt, as in the emotion felt when one of them has already agreed to throw out the plastic bar stools, the two dumpster-dived Barcaloungers and the mini-fridge to make room for the other one's stuff, and all that's asked in return is the willingness to spend $350 for a pair of barrel chairs.

Taste, guilt and barrel chairs are beasts preying on couples shopping on 14th Street. Perhaps they should seek counseling from Jennifer Marshall, a Stanford art history professor who specializes in 20th-century American aesthetics. Marshall listens to a description of the chairs. She says they sound like they were "made in a home workshop . . . completing the picture of a guy's dream den." She says the chairs may be part of the Do-It-Yourself age. In such cases the very garishness of an object is what makes it appealing.

After seeing a photograph of the chairs, she states: "Okay. Those are pretty ugly." Then again, she doesn't have to live with a man who loves them.

A bit of history: Way back in the days of basement workshops and crosscut handsaws, people used to make barrel chairs. The Giant Home Workshop Manual from 1941 has a full-page spread of an aproned man working away at one. The finished product is a squat piece of floral-fabric furniture that looks like it might head-butt you.

Then furniture companies started making them, like Kentucky Brothers Furniture, which made these chairs. Johnson bought them for Hunted House at an auction outside of York, Pa.

There were four of them but he bought only two, because one was in bad shape and things sell better in even numbers.

He knows the agony of couples shopping for furniture.

He once watched a couple come in every weekend looking at blond teak nesting tables. He wanted them. She didn't. Well, she did, but only if they could be stripped down and repainted, which he thought defeated the purpose.

It was always sort of sad, says Johnson, to see them never agree.

So they came in every weekend until one week the tables had just been sold and the new owner happened to be waiting outside for his partner to arrive with a truck.

"I was kind of glad the couple arrived when they did," says Johnson. "So they could see how easy it is to just buy some goddamn tables."

The couple said farewell to the tables. Then they went inside and quickly bought an ottoman.

And now, on a Sunday afternoon, that time when recently cohabited couples look at vintage pieces and feel two relative tastes colliding, Suzi Emmerling is sitting in one of the barrel chairs.

Emmerling just moved in with Mike Brennan, and they are on a very tight budget, but they'd still like a sofa, because there comes a point where it stops being okay to use a futon as your main couch.

So they can't afford the barrel chairs, but Emmerling is willing to give an honest assessment of them, which is that they look farmhouse-chic, or make her think of those bougie women who have special themed rooms, like "Navajo."

But they're not bad, nothing like the yellow soap dish in which Brennan keeps his spare change.

"Last night I finally turned to him and said, 'You know what, I don't like this.' "

"I said, 'You just now decided you don't like it?' " says Brennan.

"And I said, 'No, I just now got up the nerve to tell you I don't like it.' "

They both sit back into barrel chairs, and reflect.

"Five years ago I would have hated myself for caring about furniture," says Emmerling. "But suddenly it seems so much more important. I don't know why . . . Hey, I feel like I'm in therapy. It's kind of nice how the chair cradles you. The swiveling is good for nervous habits. I actually love these chairs."

But they may not be hers to love much longer. A few days after that Sunday afternoon, Johnson says, a man came into Hunted House. He was newly single, recuperating from a rough cohabitation that had included Ikea sofas. This new phase in his life would be marked by barrel chairs, he decided, and he told Johnson, "It's really nice, not having to clear the stuff I buy through my girlfriend." He hasn't decided whether he wants to lay out that kind of money for barrel chairs, but it's nice to know that he can.