‘Fausti Mobili – Lago Point XL a terni’
courtesy of ‘Design Conversation’

So, you need furniture. You don’t have a lot of money, but even so, you’d like something a little nicer than the disposable Swedish particleboard options of Ikea or even the tvbedstore.co.uk page. That can mean only one thing: Consignment!!  You’ll probably have to travel a bit, though. But that’s okay, right? You’re going to need a truck anyway.  Consignment is also good for your carbon footprint; it reduces the need for additional furniture to be recycled, keeps what you buy out of the landfill, and items are generally consigned locally, so even transportation is minimal. It’s an environmental triple-win.

Tom and I needed a dining room table shortly after we got married.   Oh yes, we had hit Ikea, but due to the weird, narrow shape of our dining room, had pretty much struck out. Nothing that we liked would fit.  So we wandered around a bit at a consignment shop, and found what we non-hyperbolically refer to as The Perfect Table. Slightly narrow, with pull-out leaves that nearly double it in length, it fits exactly into our space with room to sit around it, and expands easily for our frequent dinner parties.  Why do I wax poetic with the details of a table that by definition, you can’t buy because we’ve already bought it?  Because it’s an example of the glories of consignment furniture- that table that someone else got rid of, probably because it was too small for their new dining room, was the absolute perfect thing for our needs, and it’s high quality, and probably better than we would have been able to afford brand-new. (We bought chairs to go with it an an open-air antiques market, but that’s another post.)

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