That's why, during a visit to Copenhagen last November, I visited the museum of decorative arts and took pictures of a chair design exhibit (top left). Denmark is the best designed country in the world, so neat and clean. Modern design was born on the windswept flats of those northern isles. The entire society, even the citizens, are well designed, it seems.

The picture above right  is of three chairs. Kitchen chairs. The pink one, for certain, is from Richmond, Quebec. Tighsolas. (I painted it pink.) The other a sixties purchase. The other a recent Pier Import purchase.  The dog is Bullwinkle.

For this shoot, I placed the flat iron on the middle Tighsolas chair, because many years ago, one of my husband's ancestors, likely Margaret, Edith or Flo,  did the same, but at that time the iron was hot, and it burnt its impression into the wood.

This particular chair probably was made in the late 1800's in the Eastern Townships. I know because I visited the Richmond County Historical Museum a few years ago and saw an identical chair. (The Nicholsons are from Richmond.) And this chair, however you rate its aesthetics, is well-made. VERY well made. I would not hesitate (well, I don't hesitate) to stand my middle-aged bulk on this chair to, say, change a wasteful  incandescent  light bulb to one of those low energy ones. 

Now, the table in my dining room is classic Ikea, circa 2000. Seven years ago when we purchased our second home, finding ourselves for the first time with  a dining space, we could not afford high quality furniture (or antique furniture at Finnegan's) so we went to Ikea (of course) and bought this table and six lightweight chairs. I recall, the chairs cost 59.00 each. I don't have a picture of them because I recently cleaned out the garage and sent them to the dump. (No one wanted them, not even those people who pick up trash at the roadside, or nephews and nieces going to away to college.) The chairs were falling apart - that's why I got rid of them. I was afraid some elderly relative would hit the floor at a family gathering and break a hip.  To put it simply, the Ikea chairs were crap.  Not ugly. No way, ugly.  In fact this model resembled a certain classic highback chair from 1900 designed by the legendary Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

You might get the impression I don't like Ikea, either, but I do.  Ikea has elevated all of our design sensibilities, immersing us in aesthetics that stem from turn of the last century  Scandinavia and Germany--when that Sears Catalogue was published! Ikea has made even student hovels chic and efficient!

Ikea stores are like bustling bubble-gum hued live-in-the-moment museums. The company produces beautiful and affordable pieces. But only the aesthetics will endure. Everything Ikea manufactures will surely end up in a landfill, maybe 30 years from now. (I have this idea about the Antiques Roadshow, 2040. People are lined up, holding some Ikea piece, a lamp or chair. An expert is pontificating on camera about one piece …"Oh, yes. This is Bjorne, circa 1989, legs lost as usual. "

Needless to say, those avant-garde furniture chairs created on the cutting-edge for connoisseurs 100 years ago, now displayed in genuine museums or auctioned at Sotheby's, were not to be seen in the 1906 Sears Catalogue. It wasn't until the sixties that most of us got to glimpse them, first in swinging sixties movies featuring the likes of Albert Finney or Julie Christie and then in our own kitchens and family rooms if our parents had money and were into 'cool' stuff, like neon orange shag rugs.  My cousins, I recall, had Scandinavian furniture in their home. I was impressed.  I thought the furniture austere but in a vital, vibrant way (as if respect for the wood meant the tree hadn't really died)  with comfy leather cushions that seemed impossibly posh and high end.

Middle class people in early 1900's would have been shocked by the new designs, which would have seemed so unfamiliar and carried no recognizable historical elements and consequently little to hang their judgment on.

Modernists shied away from historicism and delved into imitating natural forms (Art Nouveau) or relied on pure geometric lines, a nod to the new world order  being swept in by galloping technological advances.. (I have a few Art Nouveau vases from my mom's French Canadian family. They were Bourgeois, with money to spend on trips to New York, unlike the Nicholsons who were broke.)

But it doesn't mean ordinary middle-class cash-strapped people back then didn't have some pieces of quality. Like that pink Tighsolas kitchen chair, made by local craftsman, and, demonstrably, made to last; a chair that holds family history,  that was often carried onto the front lawn at Tighsolas in Richmond, Quebec  for an elegant afternoon tea with neighbours, all the women in their white dresses (I have the photos), the gossip flowing as freely as the refreshments. Today, a great-grandson sits on the chair as he registers for September classes on his laptop or listens to some funky Norwegian Metal Band  on his iPod. Imagine, from stove-heated flat irons to iPods. What that kitchen chair has seen!