How many chairs is enough?

Him outdoors makes furniture. Beautiful pieces with proper joints, no botching and no nails. He works slowly, far too slowly to ever make money at it even if he wanted to which he doesn't, but he says that to be slow and meticulous is a relief after a working life of rushing to meet deadlines with hardly ever enough time to fully see a job through. So he's made pieces for family, for friends and just at the moment he's making a dressing table for our daughter, hour after hour spent carefully shaping, cutting, joining, refining, in an attempt to finish it by what's beginning to look suspiciously like a deadline - her wedding in June.

I feel very lucky that Him outdoors has such skill and commitment. But there is a downside. I've discovered that fine furniture makers love to make chairs. Of course chairs are useful, necessary even, but you can have too many of them, particularly if you move from a house with biggish rooms into one with smaller and fewer  rooms.  We did get rid of some chairs, the old IKEA ones that we used to keep in the cellar, but we kept all the ones that Monsieur had made, obviously. You can't give away something somebody has spent months perfecting, can you? (Can you?)


Not only that, the other day when we were talking about what he might make when he'd finished the dressing-table, he mentioned a chair again. 'I like making chairs,' he said.


 It's a kind of obsession, a fetish, this chair business, not confined to my particular beloved, but apparently to many designers and makers, as well as people who study furniture, who write about furniture, its history and culture.

For example, there is a book - you may have seen it - called 1000 Chairs  and another called Fifty Chairs that Changed the World.  Excuse me for asking but how does a chair change the world? Seems a bit OTT to me but maybe I'd better read the book (not). Further to this, M'Lud, when we went on a short break to Vienna, turns out there's a chair museum - I kid you not - which consisted of rows and rows of hundreds, probably thousands of, well, chairs.  He went round it. Guess who didn't? This is a man who once hoped to oversee the fall of capitalism and now spends a considerable amount of his dwindling time examining chairs, many of which once supported the richly trousered and skirted bottoms of the Hapsburg Empire.

All this makes it hard to imagine that he will ever be willing to part with even one of his darlings. But you can have too much of a good thing. We're finding it difficult to move. 

I looked it up as you do - googled obsession with chairs - and sure enough, I found a world of chair fanatics out there: chair theories, chair philosophies, chair psychologies. “Why chairs?” writes David Byrne at Design Taxi  “Well, they have arms and legs and vaguely human scale and shape. They’re people—they hold you, support you, elevate you or humble you. They’re characters with lives and histories, aren’t they?” 

I look at this latest and most beautiful chair R made and do have to acknowledge that it has a presence, it holds out its arms to you, willing you to sit, to be comfortable. I could never let this one go.