Flutterby™! : Furnishings

Brunch the other day was served on the host family's silver. For some reason that got me to thinking about legacies; my parents have a set of silver flatware, but it's never seemed practical to me. True, every Friday night we got out the good dishes and the silver, and I remember those meals, but it doesn't hold the same feeling of nostalgia and legacy to me that, say, the simple pine bookshelf which my dad made that holds my cookbooks does.

As I was cleaning up the kitchen this morning I daydreamed about a company that might help people make heirlooms with meaning: What if that set of silver could be accompanied by an old faded picture of grandpa tipping the crucible of molten silver into the mold for that spoon? What if legacy furniture and furnishings weren't just something your grandparents bought, but if every time the family sat down to dinner they'd know that their ancestors were involved in making that table...

It wouldn't have to be actually making the table, it could be "invite 'em in for a few hours on a weekend and entertain them while they do some sanding" (which you'll probably have to correct later), but it seems to me that it could be a cool selling point to say "don't just leave them things you bought, leave them a legacy."

So I glanced at this article about furnishing that 72,000 square foot fantasy home and gagged. If someone with essentially unlimited money wanted to furnish a home they could do so much better than wandering down to Union Square and delegating the decision. A trip to, for instance, the Amana Colonies could let you not only get furniture that's in those styles, or in much more tasteful and refined ones, but would let you talk with the builders about your specific desires, and would probably result in higher quality materials.

At which point I realized that ostentation is not about quality, and if you're that way your kids will run away to join some neo-communist terrorist cell anyway and your furniture will be sold at soime pennies on the dollar estate sale and there was no sense of meaning for the ages there anyway, and my daydream went "poof".