It pains me to disagree with you Pal, but your chair is diminished— and then some. There’s a limit to the amount and degree of degradation an object can sustain and still maintain functionality and some modicum of appearance. You have officially reached that point with the chair whose foam is hanging out 😎

I get your point, and you had me right up to the picture that makes me feel sorry for a chair!

I love your chairs: is the second one Stickley? And I agree about the wear, which can even enhance a piece.

I have a large Moroccan rug that my mother bought at the old Parke-Bernet in NY in the '60s; it covered much of our living room floor when I was growing up. It's now in my family room, its braided fringe completely gone in places and with some worn spots where many people's feet have made their impressions while sitting on different sofas 60 years apart. It's the opposite of a Ruggable.

Oh, it won't be this way for much longer. (It's actually quite functional with the foam hanging out).

But this goes back to the other thread, I have to decide what goes on it, and that will take a while.

Here's another one. This is the latch on one of my ovens. The Frigidaire with the yellowed and cracked plastic the house came with was much more depressing to me than this.

That latch doesn’t bother me in the least— but then I am not sitting on it either 🙄 Also, TBH, no one would really see the latch, where the chair is like a hostage crisis playing out in your living room.

I tell myself that one of these days I am going to sit down and pick new stuff for our kitchen, and maybe the master bath while I am at it, but who am I kidding? The enormity of such tasks is why I like to hire an interior designer.

Actually the chair is currently in my bedroom so no one sees it anymore but me. And the conversation forum. The complete tear through only happened this summer. I wish I had the perfect piece of leather.

I wish you did too— although the bedroom is at least not public. I am shallow like that. 🙄

We have two Martha Washington chairs upholstered in an inexpensive black leather. I had them in DH’s office in our downtown building and did not want to spend a lot redoing chairs that would only be used by patients with a variety of pre- and post-op conditions that would make cloth upholstery unwise. I’m having them reupholstered because my darling grandson BIT the back of one of them and then months later ran a metal car missing one of its wheels across the seat of the same chair. Teethmarks and a gash…usually leather can take any abuse and turn it into patina, but this was inexpensive and hasn’t lasted. So I really do get your point.

When I read the title of this thread, I thought it was regarding skin care. 😀

Yes, there is no such thing as patina on IKEA. But I think some of it is that we are just less willing to part with something valuable, and the mindset with particle board is always temporary. I think Rachel Ashwell deserves a lot of credit for how we view "incidental bits of aging and damage."

I also believe we treat finer things with more care than disposable items perhaps. I regularly shave cat claw marks off my real rugs verses my cheaper amazon ones.

Your Nakashima chair damage would cause me some stress. The others, not at all.

Having been enamored with vintage and antiques for 40+ years, most imperfections due to age and use do not bother me. They actually make me like some pieces even more. Scratches from pets are a different story.

My first thought was also skin care, until I saw it was Pal's thread.

We bought a Stickley Mission oak coffee table on FB marketplace several years ago. It is a pretty big table, I think 42” round. The people who owned it were selling for $400 bc it had been damaged during a move to their current house. It is perfect except for a few, admittedly deep, gashes on the tabletop. Every so often I think about trying to have the top repaired, but then I don’t. At least with the pre-scratched top, I don’t worry about damaging it ourselves.

We have a round cherry Stickley dining table in the K of our first house. It was only a year or so old when I had someone over to the house to discuss paint colors for the trim on our house. She put down a heavy binder with some sort of metal components on our table, and proceeded to create a huge scratch when she opened the binder!

Amazingly, over time, the scratch cured itself. And by that I don't mean it got so many other scratches that it didn't matter ... it mysteriously disappeared. Maybe yours will too?

Love this thread, and your pics, Pal.

I have a few pieces with strong ”patina” and embrace them — an almost antique Jacobean buffet that has a lot of wear (most people would paint it), a vintage Chippendale china cabinet showing its age, an antique cut crystal lamp (family heirloom, possibly Pairpoint) with chips and missing many of the prisms, an old rug with threadbare spots, etc. The aging gives ’em character. :)

I totally agree, though, that some items can age well, others not so much.

That the Nakashima chairs, particularly that one lost the finish so rapidly does bother me. But it could be refinished fairly easily and I think you could do just the back because they are natural with lacquer and they change colors anyway. And they would be worth refinishing.

That said, since it has the most damaged finish, it is the one that gets sat in the most, because the damage is already done. It's sitting downstairs in an unfinished part of the house so there is a place to sit. If it were pristine it would not be there.

I think it's all on a continuum, but I think there are people who treat cheaper things with less care because they are cheaper and can be replaced. I have a friend who buys a new cheap tablecloth if she hosts a holiday dinner and throws it out after people go home, because it is just a cheap tablecloth why waste time on it. I think that becomes a self-fulfilling sort of situation.

I feel like when I had IKEA and Conran furniture that was just melamine on particle board I was conscious that there were edges that could chip easily so I was careful with that too, rather than not worrying because it was cheap. I have an IKEA two miles from my house--we even walk there, eat, and walk home sometimes, but living in an urban environment with no car, the idea of running to IKEA and buying another piece of furniture to replace something damaged, easily, the IKEA might as well be on another planet in terms of how convenient it would be for us to do that.

On the other hand I don't baby my persian rugs at all because you can do almost anything you want to them and even if it wears them, it doesn't have much of a negative effect as far as I am concerned.

Mtn, these are gouges, not acratches, no way they’re gonna repair themselves. We usually have so much stuff on the table that they don’t really show.

My vintage aluminum desk chair I use daily has some cracks along the front of the vinyl upholstery seat, but not as bad as the wood chair pictured above. I have memory foam cushion on it - before that I used to keep a piece of fabric over it.

Seats like that on the wooden chair are really easy to recover - and you don't need much material either. I wish it were so easy to recover my desk chair seat.

My vintage sewing machine chair has torn upholstery on the back, and I just slipped a decorative pillowcase over it.

Our rustic coffee table was made from a piece of antique wood by my dad back in the 1950s. In the 1980s my son went at it with a screwdriver (he was 2) and the top was badly gouged, a few years later, I accidentally sprayed it with oven cleaner I mistook for furniture polish, so it's got a big area of bare wood, but even tho I keep thinking I should sand it down and repair the finish, I've never done so.

I found two pictures of the yellow table from our apartment, and from a temporary apartment. It's odd that I ended up living in the temporary one, because I was supposed to look at that apartment about 15 years before, and when the realtor unlocked the door we could hear someone in the shower, so we closed the door and left. I probably would have bought this one rather than the one I did.

So here it was in the second apartment I owned.

And her it is in the temporary rental. This photo is one of those stretchy realtor photos. But maybe you can see why I did not want it to be painted black. It was beat up, it is a bossy color, but black would not have been good. I imagine it was originally in a high 1970s green/white/yellow room.

Oh, i like the table! Sort of Chippendale / Parsons hybrid.

I picture it with upholstery like this, originally

Or someplace like this:

Oh yes, Palm Beach meets Sister Parish! ❤️