Short Sale, Part 3: Style by Coco
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Sandra Tsing Loh buys a dinning room set for her new home at a yard sale.
So I'm driving through a tattered part of Northwest Pasadena, and I see a lawn bearing a shabby eruption of typical Los Angeles yard saleage. The broken VCR, collection of chipped Dodgers cups, volcano of vaguely soiled stuffed animals.
When I see them, rising slightly above the fray – a quartet of wooden chairs, pleasingly spindly – I want to say even slightly, if you squint your eyes, Shakery?
It is only recently that I would even hazard a term such as Shakery. It is only recently that I've become furniture-obsessed. As I've been describing, I'm about to move into a three-story turn-of-the-century home I'm only able to afford because it's a short sale. A short sale that's going unusually smoothly, by the way. Anyway!
All that apparently remains, over the next three weeks, is to buy lots of furniture, as I don't really own any.
And of course I have no budget, as I'm now so financially stretched – which is why last week, visiting my friend Henry in New York? There was no way I was going to stand in a Soho boutique and do anything but laugh at those $4,000 Biedermayer armchairs.
Never mind that, imported from Sweden, these antiques could be custom-reupholstered to my taste in Manhattan, and then shipped – nay rushed – to Los Angeles. As the desperate Versace-clad salesman was, in his empty Soho boutique, suggesting.
Especially when here, in Pasadena, above Orange Grove, the price for this burnished, solid oak, elegantly distinctive – and as I said, almost Shakery – wooden chair was... The sharpie-scrawled sign taped to the BACK said "700." Hm. Was that $700? $70 dollars?
"Seven," corrected the chairs' owner, a 30-something Hispanic fellow clad in Raiders sweatshirt, cargo shorts, and flip-flops, his ensemble accessorized by three Big Wheels-driving children.
"Seven dollars?" I gasped. "For a solid oak wooden chair? I'll take all four!" A dining room set of oak chairs for $29? That made IKEA look like Wickes, surprisingly Wickes! Surprisingly going out of business!
As I struggled to jam them into my packed Volvo, my salesman, amazed by my frantic enthusiasm, revealed that he had six more of these chairs. I had no idea if they matched the house, but I figured at $70 for 10 chairs, if they didn't work out, I could simply pitch them into the sea. But I needed to come back for them. "Can you leave a deposit?" he said. "How much?" "Five?" "Five dollars?"
"Where did these chairs come from?" I asked, gurgling over my acquisition of antique Americana.
The answer: "Coco's Family Restaurant!"
No wonder they're so familiar-looking, and sturdy! They'll do well when we export them to Sweden!
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