This afternoon I went with YY to 第六空间, allegedly the finest furniture store in town. I was actually just looking for a footstool but discussion soon turned to the new apartment and what we should buy in order to furnish it.
Unfortunately, matters of taste between Chinese people and non-Chinese people seem to differ completely. YY was taken with a wide variety of items in the store whereas I hated 99% of the items intensely. It's not just a question of not liking them a little bit, it's a question of not being able to remotely consider the prospect of having to look at these items every day. I'll show you YY's favourite dining suite (that they reluctantly agreed to let me photograph) and you'll see what I mean.
You can see the matching living room here. I'm told that such a living room would be, to paraphrase, the Mercedes S600 of living rooms. People coming to the apartment would think that we were extremely tasteful and well to do to have such a well-appointed apartment. My point was that any friends or family visiting the apartment would think that we had taken leave of our senses - particularly eyesight.
We did visit an imported Italian sofa showroom (the sofas, not the showroom) where the manager kept insisting on answering both mine and YY's questions in English, despite them being asked in Chinese. They had the simplest and most-tasteful furniture - albeit most of the furniture was white leather, which doesn't appeal either (surely it gets dirty quickly?).
3 comments:
Yeah but some Ikea stuff, their entire range of sofas for example, is just cheap junk. What I need is a Marks and Sparks or Next Home.
Look at the bright side of all this - at least now I know where to go if I want to create an 18th-century-themed brothel. Not that these horrors are cheap mind - that white dining table was 2000 GBP on its own.
18th century-themed brothels are more tasteful than that.
I bow to your greater experience in these matters.
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