I’ve always had an eye for chairs, or they for me, and ours has not been a relationship of resistance. Succumbing to them, being possessed by them, has often felt as undeniable as love at first sight.
In fact, I confess to remembering the chairs of my youth in almost as much detail as I do kind friends and acquaintances who’ve come and gone through the years. The weary walnut rocking chair from the estate sale in Litchfield, Connecticut. The graceful oak armchair with brass tacks and leather seat that my twenty-something boyfriend and I tucked into the back of his Subaru on a road trip to Michigan. The square, tomato-red leather club chair rescued from the Grand Street flea market in lower Manhattan and wheeled back to my apartment on top of a borrowed metal shopping cart.
Thus began what has become a lifelong pursuit of chairs with history and great bones, sweet personalities and good stories. Over the years, imagining the pieces in new ways has become as gratifying as discovering them in the first place, and, from this, my appreciation for textiles of all sorts has evolved.
Until recently, chairs were one of my vagaries (or vices, if you ask my beloved husband), but editing was my vocation. “Polishing people’s prose” was how I described the work, which was satisfying because, like fixing up furniture, editing is at its core about transformation and seeing potential in things that others may not.
Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that I’d rather work on chairs than sit in them most of the day. And that, perhaps, Rumi was on to something when he wrote “Let what you love be what you do.”
So I bid farewell to editing and turned my professional attention to building a chair business. Countless estate sales and flea markets (which my exceedingly patient kids now call “chair-rends”) later, Gussy was born.
