I, personally, enjoy good heavy quality wood furniture. I have an ornately carved dining room set I bought 18 years ago or so that has served me well. Same thing with a few nice armchairs, bars, side-tables, etc. We’ve also been buying pieces from some local furniture makers - rustic style bedframes, that kind of stuff.
My parents have a few pieces of Ethan Allen and such that I’m pretty sure me and my brothers will fight over when the time comes.
I truly don’t get folks who are OK with pressboard and Ikea, assuming they can afford better. I lived with that in college & early career, but as soon as I had some disposable income I put it into decent-quality furniture. Why not?
(For what it’s worth, I live in a 5K square foot house on 11 acres, a 5-10 minute drive from downtown. We didn’t pay anywhere near $750K for it (close to half that, really). It’s not all that hard to find land & nice homes if you can manage living away from big, expensive cities.)
In my family its more a case of a glut on the market; families are smaller, people are living in smaller homes, and aunts and uncles have passed with no kids. We’ve picked a piece or two that are basically heirlooms but just how much furniture do we need? And when we pass (no kids) I expect even the best-of-the-best we’ve saved will end up well away from the family. Add to that the fact that some stuff from the past just doesn’t fit modern buildings or uses and it isn’t a hopeful future for wooden things in the family tree.
These articles aren’t surprising except for the fact they consider family photo albums as “heirlooms nobody wants”
Unless all the photos are already digitized it seems like a massively bad idea down the road to get rid of your parents photo albums, it’s not like you don’t have the space for them.
We’ve got a grandfather clock. It weighs around 180 pounds, needs to be wound weekly, has to be adjusted at least twice a year for changing winter and summer house temperatures, and, is at the best of times, accurate to around 30 seconds a week. On Ebay ones just like it run close to 10 kilobucks.
My two children actively compete to not inherit the damn thing. They point to their mobile phones, which weigh a couple of ounces, are accurate to fractions of a second, require no maintenance, and oh yeah, can make phone calls, play mp3 files and movies, access the internet, and do a thousand other things. It’s not much of a contest.
I think this highlights a major issue, though not the one the posters are thinking of - people want furniture that fits their personal aesthetic for their own house. The ‘heirloom furniture’ fits the utility of some ancestor who lacked things like flatscreen TVs, high quality small speakers, walk-in closets, etc, and also their aesthetic. While I love finished wood furniture, I would really not like someone ‘giving’ me furniture that they’d be upset if I painted to match my own house. I think that general attitude sits with a lot of heirloom furniture even if it’s not directly there, the idea that this isn’t really your furniture, but a sort of museum piece that you’re borrowing that your granddad liked the look of and expects you to pass on, unchanged, to your grandkids.
A gift is a gift and I wouldn’t disown any grandchild who painted over hardwood to “freshen” up the piece. I would just rather they ask for a dresser in their aesthetic instead and leave the walnut for those that appreciate the look of wood more than paint.
We live in a 3 bedroom split-level and have several rooms full of Stickley furniture. We bought it over decades because we like it. Would be nice if our kids wanted it - and it will still be solid and beautiful (in our opinions) when we pass. But who knows whether any of our kids will want it? One lives in a modest home relatively nearby, so I imagine she will take some. But the other 2 live 1000 and 2000 miles away. One in a townhouse, the other in a 1 bedroom apt. No idea what their living situation will be when we pass. Will it be worth it to them to pay to ship our stuff across country? Will they have developed their own personal preferences by then and have furnished their homes accordingly?
I can imagine if either of us develops mobility issues, we will downsize to a smaller, single-level place. Imagine we should be able to call a consignment place to have them pick up and sell anything we can’t use and the kids don’t want. It is just “stuff”.
I can imagine them being far more interested in accent pieces - an occasional table or cabinet, than a full dining set. I sure hope someone wants my mom’s Eames chairs…
I got into the older stuff in self defense. We moved into our current house, which was built around 1914, in 1980somethingorother. Nice tall rooms but no walls – all doors, pocket doors, windows and everything else. Our living-room is like 24x26 and has a total of maybe 10 feet of actual wall. Re-purposing the old tall and narrow stuff was about the only thing we could do. That and have new stuff custom designed and built. Yeah I could remodel --------- over my wife’s cold dead body. We bought back the old family house her grandparents and greats built and that just isn’t going to happen.
Next generation all bets are off.
And that could be why some heirloom stuff in terms of furniture is going away from families. Thinking about what we have and the houses the “kid cousins” (who inherit from us) have, I can see some of it being a very bad fit.
Big hint –> If you love your children, label your photographs! I’ve inherited photos that have been passed down three times and figuring out who those people are can be difficult. You can’t expect people to be thrilled to inherit anonymous pictures.
Photo albums are also more likely to be desired if there are memories attached of sitting with mom or grandpa and hearing a bunch of old family stories. So if you’ve got the photos, take the time to share them with the younger folks.
In an era when society and living arrangements change very little from grandparent to grandchild, it’s at least plausible that GC will share some attitudes and aesthetics with GP. And will likely have similar living arrangements.
Also, at one time the concept of “filial piety” ran much deeper in our society. As long as your ancestors are alive, you are (partly) their property. You only graduate into true independent adulthood with the death of all your ancestors. And you remain part-owner of your children, nieces, etc., until your own demise. The elders decide; the youngers obey. It’s simply How the World Works.
I think it’s beyond obvious that both those ideas have little relevance to 21st Century USA.
Related anecdote:
We had a thread a few years ago where the OP told of a family feud developing about whether or not to name an impending birth “John the 4th”. They responses were going both ways, back and forth pro and con until it fell to me to offer the following formula:
Somehow one side of the family has decided that a decision made in 1800 to name one kid “John” (not *his *fathers’ name) meant that forever into the future everyone else was only allowed to name their kid “John”. Who in hell decided that particular ancestor, and no other, would have that power in perpetuity? What of the earlier ancestors who hadn’t made that same decision?
Said that way the idea of a mandatory John the 4th, 5th, etc., doesn’t begin to pass the laugh test, much less be a serious proposal.
I have turned down family-offered furniture due to the strings attached. Sometimes, those strings are explicit (I had a cousin offer an antique bed if I could come get it, and the bed was certainly nice. But he also said that if I ever didn’t want it, I’d have to transport it back to him. I decided it just wasn’t worth it.), and sometimes they’re not, but I’d rather just say no than deal with some simmering family grievance over not properly caring for Great-Grandma’s whatever.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
I kinda like nice furniture, and I can certainly afford it, but I’d much rather go snowboarding. I owned exactly zero piece of nice furniture before I met my wife, and the only reason we own any now is that it makes her happy.
I’m more in alignment with SamuelA: Why would I want to trade one more second of my finite and shrinking life for stuff?
I drive a shitty car, too.
If I were independently wealthy and could take all the snowboarding trips I wanted, sure I’d buy a nice car and chairs and stuff. But those things are pretty low on my list of priorities.
Based on my friends, it depends on the piece(s) of furniture. Heirloom dining room tables and chairs are much more likely to find a new home than a sofa. Some styles of bookshelves will find someone to love them. Old beds are probably going to go unloved.
When I was a child, we weren’t allowed to play near this chair, or that table. They were very expensive, we kids were told, and we would eventually inherit these incredibly expensive pieces of furniture, thus enriching ourselves. In the interim, we must never approach them with food or drink, lest we spill and mar the finish; either way we must not approach them with anything that might scratch them.
After Mom and Dad passed, my sister and I found that these pieces of furniture weren’t worth what Mom claimed. Why? Because nobody wanted them. I think we got $15 for Mom’s prized walnut dining room table. Mom claimed it was worth $1500, and maybe it was–to the buyer who was willing to pay that. Few buyers wanted to pay that (in fact none did) and so we ended up taking $15 for the table.
A lesson both Sis and I learned: an object is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. No matter how much of an “heirloom” piece it is claimed to be, it is only worth what somebody is willing to pay.
This brings up one of my pet peeves. For me, furniture is meant to be used. If it’s not allowed to be used, then you’ve replaced your living space as a storage area.
::shudder:: I grew up with those. They were especially bad come summer time. Shorts and vinyl covers are a terrible mix.
In my Mom’s defense, they never really had much money. The living room furniture needed to last through 4 kid’s childhood. But yeah, terrible idea overall.
Isn’t it all just a remnant from the time, not that long ago, when “regular” people didn’t really own furniture, they rented furnished apartments (or unfurnished apartments they furnished with homemade junk) and lived out of steamer trunks? When actually owning furniture meant something significant, and it was such an expense that you had to pass them on to your children or you’d be significantly diminishing the family’s wealth?
Or am I just making all of that up based on old Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin movies?
There were furnished rooms more than furnished apartments is my understanding. Even the poor in the crappy tenement housing had some basic furniture of their own. This was my grandparents experience in NYC at least.Though only one common bathroom per floor.
See, I think this is a great example of people seeing things completely differently. Take a dining room table, I’m going to spend 350 hours a year sitting at my table and if I buy a nice table like the $1,500 walnut table above, then it works out to $4/hr but if that table lasts me 40 years then it works out to $0.10/per hour. That seems really cheap to me for something that I enjoy looking at and is comfortable to eat at.
Making sure it lasts 40 years is why I’d rather pay more. I’ve got a Flexsteel couch I bought a dozen years ago for about two grand I still sit and lay on it every day though it needs to be recovered. On the other hand, I bought a couch from Ashley furniture for about a grand it only lasted three years and I couldn’t give it away at a garage sale when I moved. Of course, I’m only looking for furniture to last my lifetime and I couldn’t care less if my daughter takes my couch off of my corpse.
Same thing with the house. I spend roughly 5,000 hours per year at home. Even if I could by my dream home it would cost me about $60K per year. Which is $12/hr I spend at home but it should at least get divided by my wife and myself so really I’m looking at $6/hr which is cheaper than going to a movie or going skiing unless you’re going 10+ hours on a one day pass.
