Very insightful article. Thank you for posting it.

How timely! He hit on the point I make about an undercurrent as to whether the work is legitimate.

I do have to say though, that this is a silly statement:
"It is not unusual for our clients to have a chair that�s worth a million dollars"
I allow that there are those who surely travel in pricier circles than I do, but even so I can confidently rebuke such a dumb sentence.

I also found funny, again, the need to debase any notion of value. He will "spend your money well" but not buy something "cheap". If he is spending your money well, he should buy what you want or need at the best price for that item (which, based on quality, may still be a a very high price but could be "cheap" for that item) .

Funny the only time the word cheap is good is when you are talking about investments! In my industry no one shudders and withdraws at the mention of cheap bonds, cheap stocks, cheap currencies...

"Everyone wants their home to reflect themselves, but how do you do that in a time of globalization?" said Daniella Ohad Smith, a design historian. "How do you create your own taste, if everyone has access to the same goods?

It's hardly a new dilemma, 'time of globalization' or no.

The million dollar chair is likely to be a rare and museum quality antique, and that value is established by the marketplace, just like the price of those securities.

The buying of things for interior design at the very high end is not necessarily driven by price, although everyone I know in the business loves to find things at a good price. Note I say "good," not necessarily "cheap."

The misunderstanding that a designer is primarily a purchasing service for things the client wants is fairly common.

Please - now pay attention.
Not all clients are alike.
Not all designers are alike.

Those of us in the trade come to understand what we are best at, and just like anyone else, we often specialize. I am not for everyone, nor should I be.

Like any intimate relationship - and making someone's house a home is an intimate relationship - a successful designer/client interaction is based on trust, mutual understanding, common values, and compatibility. Without those things, trouble is likely to follow.

BW,

Yes of course it is a rare antique. I'd argue it is not even decor and does not belong in the article. I would also think if you had such a chair, you might well be advised not to touch it ... of course you may be rescuing it from prior upholstery.

Not to harp on it too much, but the quote IMHO had no place in the story and was just there to fit in with the current anti-1% rage.

But that isnt my only favorite dumb quote.

Here's the worst one:

"It comes up all the time," said Darren Henault, another conjurer of luxurious interiors. "People say, �What am I going to get out of it, what�s my return?� " To that end, Mr. Henault promises to price a job based on the investment potential of a property.

"If a couple just purchased an apartment for $1,000 a square foot, and they plan on staying there for 5 or 10 years, maybe they can sell it for $1,500 a square foot," he said. "That�s a budget. It doesn�t come from nowhere, it comes from the market. Then you back into it. For $500 a square foot, you can�t get gold fixtures or hand-painted Gracie wallpaper, but you can do O.K."

WHAT? Why in the world, a priori, should one expect a 50% cumulative return over 5-10 years? And if one did, why would that justify decor expenditures? So from 2007-2012, what should their budget have been?

I have never heard anyone phrase their ID expenditures in terms of return. Yes, a few pieces of art or fine antiques. But even then, let's be honest, the high bid/ask spread and illiquidity make for lousy investments most of the time.

The client who has a $1M chair is less likely to devalue the services of those industries such as interior design than the middle class person is. People above a certain income are more likely to pay for other people to do certain things for them, simply so they can devote their time to other things.

But I have clients with relatively low incomes who pay (or barter) for others to do things for them because they don't like doing certain types of things for themselves.

That said, I've never had, and probably never will have a client with a $XXXX chair. Oddly enough, I did have a patient who was friends with the anonymous person who bought the $8M Garvan Carver table. (They were both billionaires) and I have a patient, who is nearly destitute who has several million dollars worth of paintings in his house. The problem is that he can't afford to pay the insurance to transport them to Christie's or Sotheby's for valuation and sale. (Because his parents (his mother is 100) bought them from the artists directly, in some cases...there is expert disagreement as to their authenticity and value.

Anyway, I digress. If you are lucky enough to have something like this, or lucky enough to work for someone who does, more power to you ... but how it happens may actually be pretty random.

People above a certain income are more likely to pay for other people to do certain things for them, simply so they can devote their time to other things.

Of course.

But a $1mn chair is still unusual, and, for me, that's really my only point.

I think the NY Times reporter is being deliberately controversial and trying to imply that everyone at a hedge fund bandies about millions of dollars for baubles.

Interesting. I learned that by people appreciating the finer things, for lack of a better term, the traditions used to create them are then preserved. While I know I can't buy $1000 yd fabric, it's good to know SOMEONE can. It's keeping history alive.

Also shows that now people don't just use ID services for impressing others or being content in their homes, but that they are more concerned about the $ aspect. They are still willing to pay . . .as long as they see it as an investment.

mtnrdredux, I don't agree at all. I think the 1 percent angle is the core of the whole issue. With money so astonishingly concentrated today, as opposed to when I was a kid, it's now driving the design industry way up the ladder. Rather than a gentle slope from middle class to rich to really rich, you've got a skyrocketing slope once you get to the top--and exactly the same slope when it comes to design expenditures. Meaning, there's a lot of money that designers can make working at the top, but step below that and pickings get a lot slimmer very fast. Sorry, but the hedgies I've known do indeed have millions to drop on baubles. There has indeed been an art bubble at the top end of the market, among the people who never suffered during the crisis, and that bubble has now moved to more decor-type items; hence all the talk of investments.

I agree with you, Mtnrdredux, about the guaranteeing of a certain appreciation of value. Risky business!

Art and antiques are certainly investments, and the designer who chooses them should be responsible for using only trusted dealers, even on the down-to-earth end.

I've often advised clients of more ordinary means to spend their $2,500 dining room table budget on a decent quality antique one rather than a mass produced new one, because the new one at that price point loses a chunk of its value when you drive it off the lot, and the old one usually doesn't. Same with fine art prints and rugs.

But I would never dream of anticipating specific market appreciation for those things, any more than I would predict who my crazy cousin Ham will marry next. Although it's fun to get into the family pool on his romantic life..but I digress

The telephone cracks me up.

I'd Pin it to Pinterest except it'd get lost amongst all the Mason jars filled with twinkle lights and whatnot.

I don't disagree about the dramatic increase in income inequality, but my issue about the 1mn chair, I will not let go of. And I feel pretty confident I know of whence I speak.

To give you an example, the Top 1% has an average income of like $400k

The Top 0.01% has an average income of $31 million.

I believe that the Top 0.01% may very well spend $1 million on a chair. A single chair. But I don't think it would be de rigeur even for that rarified cohort.

And so, I stand by my statement. A $1 million chair is unusual. That's all.

I'm not saying it isn't unusual. I'm saying it isn't unusual among the top .01%--which represent that designer's clientele. We now all live in different and very isolated worlds, and the designer profiled in the article lives in that one. Those are the people who pay for design today--the middle class and upper middle class have very much scaled back.

I would be really surprised that the top 1% average income is as low as $400K...that means a goodly amount of people in that 1%age are below that. I don't think I buy it.

But even so, I think in Elle Decor, House Beautiful et al. we are seeing only the houses of the 1%, then. And it used to spread into the lower levels of affluence.

I think we are only seeing the top 5% in magazines like Better Homes and Gardens now.

It gives a very skewed idea of what should be attainable, because BH & G is supposed to be a slightly upper middle class magazine. But if you look at what the budgets must've been on a lot of those projects, these people have more income than that.

Just like TV: with things like the Friends' huge NY apartments that they could afford despite the fact most of them were out of a job at some point, the "middle class family" living in a beautifully maintained and restored house filled with Stickley furniture. It's just not real, and if you don't realize what you are looking at it leads to awfully high expectations and even a sense of entitlement. The Wolf-Subzero traditional target demographic has not shifted, for whom spending $8000 on a fridge is like the typical person spending $2000. What we have now is more people who are really the $2000 fridge demographic, thinking somehow they must have that $8000 fridge.

The million dollar chair aroused my curiosity. How about a 28 million dollar chair?

Cheska and Robert Vallois must have clientele in the top .00001% in the world.

Here is a link that might be useful: Eileen Gray The 'Dragons' Armchair

The average for the 1% is around $750K. The disparity between the bottom entry point of the 1%, making 300K, and the top .01%, making 5-7 million annually and some around a billion a year, is actually wider than the disparity between the 1% and the rest of us. Wealth is even more sharply divided than income, of course.

So obviously it's not the medical specialists who are normally buying million-dollar chairs, but those at the higher end most certainly are. In fact these people have actually run out of things to buy, and also things to invest in, which is why they've been spending their money buying laws and politicians.

Well, then we are in agreement, sort of.

I think the use of ID (other than those whose services are "free", eg sponsored by retailers), penetrates a tad deeper than the 14,000 families who average income $31 million a year!

I do also agree that the middle class (especially as defined by economists, not the self-defined middle class that nearly everyone claims to be in) and upper middle has cut back. If only because it was so linked to home equity.

But enough of that dead horse. What was the guy smoking who says, your house will of course go up 50% so spend that 50% now, today. ANd too bad that the house you want to move to next will also be up 50%.

I think there is one factor that wiped out a lot of the middle class use of interior designers and that is the demise of the regional large, full service department store.

When my parents wanted to furnish their house 44-45 years ago (before it was built: they were smart enough to realize that a house should be completely furnished--another concept people have forgotten), they went to the local (3 hrs away) department store, Kauffman's and looked and furniture and realized they didn't have a clue where to start.

When my sister moved into an apartment, each girl was responsible for furnishing her own bedroom and my parents took her off to Kauffman's and bought a really good dresser + nightstand, a relatively inexpensive brass headboard, a decent lamp, and got some wall-to-wall bound and some curtain panels and a bedspread that matched, using a decorator at the store.
Of all the junk my sister has bought and has come and gone, the 2 pieces that have followed her around for 37 years have been the dresser and nightstand.

The designers and decorators they used at the store were smart enough to know where to spend and where to save all along. My oldest sister got the cheapest bedroom furniture because she would only be using it heavily for a few years. I got the best because I was going to be there a long time.
They showed my parents 2 really good pieces for my sister and the rest was fill-in...they knew what they were doing.

This option rarely exists any more. The great thing about the apartment store decorator/designer is that they had all the manufacturers and workrooms that the company carried, and at Kauffman's at least they were allowed to find things for the client from elsewhere.

The only thing that comes close in most places now is the in-house designers attached to a particular store brand, and for some of them their "training" consists of how to write up the sales.

I don't know that in my parents case they would have hired an independent interior designer when they were starting the house. I don't know that they would've known how to find one. But when it was offered by a department store where you could walk in and point at a piece of furniture and say "I want that" and someone would sell it to you --OR, you could work with an interior designer and the furniture would cost the same, it made it a comfortable transition from consumer to client.

...and the demise of the mid-priced furniture retailer. In my area most have closed; Wickes, Homelife, Bay, Plunkett's. There's more but can't come up with them right now.

The last company I worked for (which also closed in conjunction with middle-classed families net worth plunging 40%) was an independent and offered over 50 vendors to order from. At least 12 of those were upholstery lines. What a luxury. Who offers that any more? They're far and few between.

Now it's the choice of the beige micro fiber sofa or the brown bonded leather sofa. Pick one and as an added bonus, you can see it you neighbors home too!

LOL. "Did you get that at Pottery Barn?" Said with admiration, of course.

Younger people have absolutely no idea how nice it was to be middle class when I was born. They don't know how high the quality was on everything you bought, or all the personalized services you could get. I've mentioned before, I got custom drapery for my house because my mother had custom drapery. I did not realize that, while a factory worker's wife could afford custom drapes back then, today it literally cost me more than that worker ever made in a year. Yes, there's been lots of inflation since the dark ages; but still.

So the steepness of the income pyramid has been exactly paralleled by the steepness in cost of luxury goods, which makes perfect sense, of course. You can get cheap Chinese curtains for almost nothing. Pseudo custom costs much more. Actual hand-sewn custom curtains are a flat-out fortune.

This is the whole story of the design industry today. There really aren't a lot of gradual steps in quality and cost once you get past mass market levels. If you want to step up from Pottery Barn to RH, you're going to pay a steep premium. If you want to step up from RH to Baker, you're practically scaling a vertical wall in price. The next step up from there is Marie Antoinette territory.

Everyone realizes that this is true for homeowners, who spend all their time ogling kitchens and living rooms they could never afford. But designers are like this, too. Why shouldn't they be? The ultra high end is now where all of the really nice stuff is.

Marcolo, I, too, am old enough to remember how nice the retail world used to be. When I was a little girl, I would go downtown on the bus with my grandmother (in her straw hat and white gloves) to do the shopping at the department store. We had lunch in the tea room upstairs, took home the sewing notions and the nylons and the face powder, and in the afternoon, the truck came and delivered everything else.

And we were a Southern family in reduced circumstances, so this was not a routine restricted to the most prosperous households.

The corporate behavior and market conditions you all describe were one factor in my decision to close my practice and do Something Else.

It distressed me so to try to help clients who were vastly outmatched by the marketing machine, and unable to accept what was possible at their budget level. And the growing inconsistency in quality from suppliers who used to be so reliable drove me to distraction. Over and over, a venerable company would hire some young turk who decided the new business model was to cut costs, to replace quality materials and workmanship with cheap, flimsy substitutes, and to fire all the experienced sales and customer service staff.

It's not impossible to do good work for clients, and to find good things for them, but it became a lot harder to make a living at it, and to keep a good reputation intact when disappointments and replacements had become part of too many jobs. I was just too old to put up with it!

I have gotten some of my best stuff buying it on eBay in pretty sordid condition, waiting a couple years, sometimes, to make a pair, being lucky sometimes, and being very patient. I have had one client who went the eBay route, but still had problems understanding that you would WANT to spend $400 reupholstering a $99 chair (It's so EASY, they do it with staples on TV!), or spend $300 on two lampshades for lamp bases that cost almost nothing. Eventually she realized that you Still ended up with better stuff at a cheaper price After you threw some semi-serious money at it.

Most people don't have the trust, the understanding, or the patience mostly, to work this way. I would Never have been able to afford much of the furniture I have if I had walked into a store and simply purchased it.

"but still had problems understanding that you would WANT to spend $400 reupholstering a $99 chair (It's so EASY, they do it with staples on TV!), or spend $300 on two lampshades for lamp bases that cost almost nothing."

Or would spend more on matting and framing than on the piece of art. Often, the thinking is that the art is one thing, and the frame and/or mat is another. Similarly, there's the lamp, and then there's the shade. When in fact, the painting plus the frame IS the art, and the lamp base plus shade IS the lamp.

Also, I agree with people who've commented on the effect of the closing of independent furniture stores on the ability to furnish & decorate one's home with relative ease. Within the last several years, the store at which we bought LR sofa + chairs and the one at which we bought an upholstered chair have closed. Each store had carried a decent-sized range of furniture makers & lines, accessories, and a wide selection of fabrics, none of which are to be had at Pottery Barn or its ilk, or at Restoration Hardware for that matter. If I wanted to buy similar pieces today - without traveling too far and without hiring a decorator - I probably would have a difficult, even impossible, time doing so.

"I have never heard anyone phrase their ID expenditures in terms of return. Yes, a few pieces of art or fine antiques. But even then, let's be honest, the high bid/ask spread and illiquidity make for lousy investments most of the time."

It's more than the strict bid-ask spread. Or rather, part of the issue is that too many people who buy what they hope will be "investment" furniture or "investment" art forget (or never understood to begin with) that, between dealers' and art galleries' commissions on the initial buy side and auction houses' sellers' commissions and buyers' premiums on the sell side will eat up an enormous percentage of what, mistakenly, was thought to be an item's pure market value as it were. Not to mention, the capital gains rate on collectibles, which would include true antique or investment-quality furniture, might come as an unpleasant surprise to many people.

Sure, you can luck out and happen to own pieces that, at the time you decide to unload them, may have the marketplace fighting over the items. More likely, however, unless you have been able to pick up the pieces at substantially below-market prices at the beginning or can sell individual pieces privately when the time comes, you will probably find you could have done just as well over the long-term by investing in the equities market instead.

White gloves to go downtown! I remember my mom's--wrist length with a single miniature faux pearl button.

It is certainly possible to do a very nice room through the used market. (I don't buy through Ebay anymore because of their scammer site PreyPal.) The trouble is, people who pay $150 for a dining room table on Craigslist or eBay cannot comprehend why they should pay an equal amount for an hour of time from a designer who can put it all together.

Here's an interesting chart showing household income.

Income at the 50th percentile: 42,327
Income at the 51st percentile: 43,564

Income at the 98th percentile: 360,435
Income at the 99th percentile: 506,553

Income at the 99.5 percentile: 815,868
Income at the 99.9 percentile: 2,075,574

And the distribution of income is nothing compared to the distribution of wealth:

So the top 5% have greater wealth than the combined bottom 95%.

Can you spell IKEA???

Aside: So when you hear someone bemoaning that the wealthy people pay so much more in taxes than everyone else, it's because they have so much more of the money than everyone else. Everything is relative.

Annie, what I think more people are bemoaning is that the wealthy people are NOT paying so much more in taxes! You know the scenario, "I'm Warren Buffet & my secretary pays a higher percentage of income at tax time than I do."

Some argue that with things the way they are, the wealthy can then put more dollars into spending, which is good for the economy, & serves the big picture more effectively than if they in fact did pay a comparable percentage in taxes. I suppose that is possible, but in principle is certainly not fair.

Hiring top designers, buying million dollar chairs, may be good for the economy, but so is funding the basics that tax dollars pay for, and we all know there's never enough to go around for the services really needed.

Sorry, OT!!!

I find this discussion so interesting and while I can not provide much in the way of insight or added value, I'm wondering if you all may want to address the fact that people/families are more nomadic these days?

For example, I and DH, who are at the tail ends of our fourth decades of life, have owned and lived in 4 different homes in different cities (not counting the couple of houses we rented) in our 16 years together...moving mostly for jobs (although the last move was probably more frivolous...a local move to downsize and find a more family-friendly neighborhood).

It certainly makes decorating and purchasing furnishings very difficult...we've had to sell things that didn't fit in each new house (either size-wise or decor-wise) after only a few years, too many times to count. It's gotten to the point that, although we do plan to live in this house for a long time, I have become more careful (almost fearful) about decorating in anticipation of needing to move and potentially waste more money. We have also tended to buy less expensive new items (DH works for a furniture retailer, actually, and the discount is tantalizing), which have not lasted even the few years we had them or ended up not being what we really wanted but were in a hurry to fill the house.

Craigslist can also be a trap...I went through a phase of buying things on a whim only to realize that they truly didn't work and ended up ditching them. I now (I hope!) have a keener eye and have picked up some good pieces at good prices that I believe to be versatile enough to take with us should we need to go. Although some of the pieces, still, would not fit in with a more modern home, should we end up in one...

Anyway, I will stop rambling and wonder what others' takes are on the lack of permanence affecting ID?

"I have never heard anyone phrase their ID expenditures in terms of return. Yes, a few pieces of art or fine antiques. But even then, let's be honest, the high bid/ask spread and illiquidity make for lousy investments most of the time"

But you can look at the investment in good furniture (nothing extraordinary, just good quality) with regards to
life cycle. The up front costs may be high, but the idea that you are not replacing things means you save in the long run.

One issue has become that people are so used to everyting being disposible that everything gets the c rap beat out of it. Good furniture can take it structurally, but cosmetically, of course, it looks bad.

"...but the idea that you are not replacing things means you save in the long run." Exactly. But the time-honored principle of "buy quality so that it lasts forever," is losing favor in today's world. Seems more in vogue to pronounce, "We just redecorated!" and then itemize each thing you ditched with a sigh of intense relief! (Thank Goodness that old stuff is outta heya!) I've heard people say, "I don't care if it lasts! I'm going to get tired of it anyway & will want something new down the road."

What we're talking about gets at more than money and value. We're talking about a stance, a way of life, and a way of looking at things.

Some argue that with things the way they are, the wealthy can then put more dollars into spending,

Yes, that can be argued stinky, but the wealthy only need to buy/consume so many washing machines, sofas, lamps, cars, dinners out....if the middle-class have any disposable income after paying health care premiums, college expenses, mortgage payments (23% of those mortgages underwater), gas, we could help our neighbors keep their jobs.

There are lucrative markets where large businesses like to spend - while taking advantage of our tax laws - and those markets are in other countries.

Actually, that's not really a serious argument, it's just PR spin. It not only has no theoretical basis but has been proven empirically false. E.g., the productivity of the American worker is much higher than it was 30 years ago, but that worker has seen none of those gains--in fact, has lost some--all of which were redirected upward. Fastest GDP growth in US history was achieved when top marginal tax rates were 90%.

Yes, Deedee99, not to mention loopholes and tax shelters. I could give an example made public in the news a few months a go, but I'm afraid I'll be blasted out of here for stirring the pot. We're already perilously close to "hot-topic" territory here.

Marcolo, and the average American has lost an estimated 35-39% of their net wealth since 2008! (Mostly through loss of equity.) Which are you saying is not a serious argument, btw? ( If you dare to clarify with more detail.)

I'm saying, it's not a serious argument that the top .01% getting so much richer while most other people get poorer is good for the economy. Not only is the theory shoddy but the data have crushed the idea. No one with a brain even believes it, although many people are paid handsomely to pretend they do in public.

Thank you Marcolo.

Sorry to start the OT train....back to decorating and decorators.

One of the benefits of computerization is that now mid-level furniture manufacturers are more able to offer customization options that were previously only available in high end furniture lines.

From some of the comments I read here and in other topics, it appears that many people think that they need a decorator to take advantage of such resources.

I never really thought my estimated 35 to 38% net worth before 2008 in home equity ( which was actually much more) was real money. To me it was only real money if I had money beside the home equity money to invest (which I didn't). I saw a lot of people spend like crazy people around that time that shouldn't have because they thought they were real estate rich. I'm starting to get very tired of those same people blaming and not looking a little at themselves.

I think the idea that interior items are investments is pretty silly. Investments are things you will sell when they increase in value. With some exceptions such as antiques, furniture does not increase in value.

It is even sillier to think that decorating one's home increases its value when selling. People do look at what's already in the home, but they're not buying the furniture--and it doesn't increase the appraised value of the home.

My wedding rings aren't in investment. If they become worth more, then that means my daughter will someday have more expensive rings. On the other hand, we have quite a bit of original art by an artist friend. If that becomes worth enough, we might sell it :-). (Or our kids might--I'm pretty attached to the piece he gave us as a wedding gift.) (In the link below, it's the black and white study he did before he did the yellow one)

Here is a link that might be useful: Troy's art

True, Jterri. I suppose it's really just a loss on paper unless we decide to sell our houses.

This is an interesting thread.

Re: deciding to buy new stuff and chuck the old ... We are in the middle of that with 2 apartment sized sofas. They have washable slip covers that are past the ability to wash them clean. I could sew new slip covers and refresh the foam in the back cushions , but the fabric alone would cost $300 each. Or, I can buy a new couch with a slip cover at Ikea for $500-$600. And, a single 3-seater couch would work better in the space anyways.

On the flip side, we are working with a local craftsman to build a king sized bed for us out of cherry.

I do miss being able to find furniture that is made in the US easily, though. So much of what is made overseas is made to last 5-10 years ( and this might include those Ikea Ektorp sofas).

I hear you, EC, about how pricey reupholstery can be! I don't DIY, so my prices to farm the work out are really high.

When I had my sofa, which is a family heirloom, reupholstered, it was certainly not a money saver over buying new! But I decided to go that route because of the family history of the piece, and because of the solid construction of it. I also like the scale...the smallish rolled arm vs. the large, bulky ones I was seeing in all the furniture stores at that time (2006.)

I'm an interior designer and was not very happy with the way that piece in the NYT came off. Check out my blogpost I put up today with my thoughts about their "defense".

http://carlaaston.com/designed/in-defense-interior-decorator-designer-new-york-times

Here is a link that might be useful: carlaaston.com/designed

I'm a Democrat and am yet astounded at some of the misinformation being bandied about.