It’s out with the new, in with the old as taste for furniture evolves

We live in a consumerist era, in which people prefer to get a new item rather than repair the old one.

But when it comes to furniture, Kenyans are slowly moving away from this trend and adopting the more rustic, hand-crafted pieces.

They are shunning what the pioneers of furniture-making like the Romans struggled to make smooth two millennia ago, and embracing what is rough, and finding beauty in it.

Kenyans have become bobos, a new information age elite bourgeois bohemians as The Guardian columnist David Brooks describes such people in his book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

CHIPPED WOOD

A bobo’s (the word is a combination of the first two letters of the words bourgeois and bohemians) taste is characterised by the desire to acquire what is new, while still retaining the culturally old aspect.

Ms Urvi Shah, the creative director at Odds and Ends, a furniture making company in Nairobi, knows only too well how Kenyans are finding beauty in old, chipped, and asymmetrical pieces of wood, some more than 300 years old.

Ms Shah told DN2 that Kenyans seem to have new motto when buying furniture for their homes: New is out, old is in.

When we paid her a visit at the company’s showroom-cum-workshop on Mombasa Road, we found a carpenter holding an old rugged door that had been ravaged by centuries of exposure to the elements.

BROKEN PIECES

It was chipped, broken, and pieces of the wood inlay had disappeared. The nails were rusty and unsightly.

Meanwhile, Ms Shah was looking at a pile of wood. After a while she singled one out —obviously an old door — with a certain poignancy and expectation. “This came from Indonesia…It is going to be turned into a fine coffee table, you’ll see,” she said.

It is not by default that most of this furniture that is restored and recycled comes from Asia. Asian furniture — whether from Thailand, Indonesia, Japan or Indian – embrace what is known as wabi sabi, a concept drawn from the Buddhist teaching of existence that finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence and incompleteness.

The absolute perfection that comes with newness and straightness is associated with the West, particularly the English. It is considered draining, while wabi sabi, in contrast, is seen by artists as liberating.

HISTORICAL NOSTALGIA

Barely a metre from where she is standing is a Sh120,000 table, about three feet high, with a glass top decorated with brass details visible on the inside. A few weeks ago, this coffee table was an ugly piece of wood like the one we saw the carpenter holding.

There is a stark contrast between the raw material and the finished product. The beauty of the pieces so humble and modest is alluring.

This is not carpentry, tailoring, painting or any other notable processes related to furniture making, explains. It is “restoration”, during which she brings back the “historical nostalgia” into art. This is coupled with changing the structure of the pieces to make a new product.

Most of the pieces that have undergone the process bring to the fore a question that Urvi asks aloud: “Just how many of us are sitting on goldmines in our grandfathers’ houses that could be turned into a beautiful furniture for the house and earn us millions of shillings?”

Upstairs in the shop is a cart shelf with brass details, a 300 year-old piece of furniture that was once an ox-drawn cart used by the Indian community for farming.

The shelf, Ms Shah says is going for Sh120,000 only. She emphasizes the word “only” because of the amount of work that goes into the restoration and eventual transformation.

EXPENSIVE TYPES

Not so far from the shelf is a futon chair made from the wheels of the ox cart. She had to use the wheel too? “Not even a tiny portion of the old product is allowed to go to waste because collecting these pieces of wood is dependent on my knowledge of history and how many times I have had the privilege of seeing other people’s previous culture,” she says.

Straight ahead of her is a wine rack made from an old boat imported from Indonesia, which could be more than five centuries old. Why would she go through the nerve wracking processes of collecting old, seemingly useless pieces of wood and turning them into furniture?

“This is teak, one of the most durable and expensive types of wood in the world,” Ms Shah explains. “Then there is that element of bringing back what our forefathers used and giving it space in our modern world in our living rooms.”

Teak, as she says, is expensive alright, and perhaps with good reason. According to Rainforest Alliance, a non-governmental organisation that seeks to conserve biodiversity, teak is a high-end wood that is currently harvested from carefully controlled plantations in Burma, Thailand, The Philippines, Brazil and Costa Rica.

WINE SPILLS

Different types of teak are used to make different items, depending on whether the furniture will be used inside the house or outdoors. Certain types of teak cost as much as $1,000 (Sh87,890) per metre, which is way above the prices of standard wood.

Normally, teak is impenetrable and is not vulnerable to wine or sauce spills. It is also resistant to mildew. However, the bulk of teak is harvested from the island of Java, but there are globally recognised manufacturers of teak. They include American companies Kingsley Bate, Barlow Tyrie and Gloster.

Because teak is so expensive, none of the parts of the door are thrown away. Some of the chipped pieces are used to make parts of picture frames or portions of a “hybrid” display cupboards or dressing tables.

A hybrid piece of furniture is a combination of new technology and portions of old furniture. As she walks us round the showroom, she points out a horse for the verandah, made of pieces of teak nailed together. “This horse ... it took time to make... but it is worth it,” she says.

LOVE OF DESIGN

Notably, while carpentry, tailoring and painting might be standard procedure for restoration, there is much more to making this type of furniture.

Making a 300-year-old door plucked from a farmhouse halfway across the world relevant to Kenyans calls for a love of design and a keen interest in the history of the source of the wood and the target market.

Ms Shah noted that apart from their willingness to spend more on furniture, Kenyans have become progressively interested in having specific themes in their homes.

Perhaps this shift in buying furniture, not just for functionality, indicates that they are looking for furniture that not only makes their homes a pleasant environment to live in, but also adds value.

Even in an environment where home makeovers are not much of a trend, Shah says, she has noted that several people visiting her showroom ask for “statement pieces”.

“They want something natural that will not clash with the other contemporary and Western furniture they already have at home,” she explained.

Depending on the level of customisation they require and the amount of work it entails, some customers are willing to pay as much as Sh500,000 for a piece, she says.

OX CART

But some of the pieces are not as costly. For instance, accessories such as stools and foot-rests cause about Sh10,000. Ms Shah and her team strive to ensure that the never-ending demand for rustic, western themes is met.

“The pieces do not stay here very long… some are on order and as soon as they are complete, the owners will come and pick them,” she says. It is not just the historical value of the coffee tables, shelves, or any other product in her shop that matters.

The trick is to make the items in such a way that it draws no attention to itself for its construction or design. Nothing should tamper with its oldness. When the old doors, carts and boats enter the showroom, they are specially waxed and stained.

But the process is not as simple as it sounds. Since the surfaces of the old pieces carry information on the technologies and the cultures of the past, she has to be very careful not to tamper with that because that information is very useful for historians.

TURNED INTO STANDS

So, she cannot make any major alterations to the shelf made from the ox cart, for instance, because she wants it to retain the specific style the farmer who made the cart used.

“Each farmer had his own style regarding where to hold, the base, the wheels and all such things. You have to keep that information intact,” Ms Shah explains. The furniture’s construction, for instance the way the wood was joined, also has to be maintained.

A look at the old window panes that are just about to be wiped before they are turned into stands for a coffee table reveals that the they were joined using the double mortise and tenon technique.

Consequently, the coating used on the surface of the old wood does more than just protect it from spills and abrasion; it adds to the aesthetics, used so carefully that it does not alter the way the piece of wood looked like originally, but only ensures that the smoothness and perfection that come with modern furniture does not replace the old artifact’s ruggedness.

LOVE FOR RUSTIC PIECES

Also, depending on how much damage the piece of wood had undergone, a special type of coating and waxing – ancient coating materials that predate written history – may be used.

Eventually, the furniture might end up at a privileged urban address in Kenya. But it will carry with it the history of where its raw materials were drawn from, which could be wood leftovers in an ordinary carpentry shop in the country, an old house in India, Thailand or Indonesia.

Restoration is not taught in school, and Ms Shah had to learn it through apprenticeship, coupled with an interest in art history and the privilege of being widely travelled.

“You must have an eye for good things, things you think Kenyans will like because there is no written rule for this,” she says. She attributes the love for rustic pieces to the ease of maintenance of the restored and recycled pieces.