Our Buying Experience: Hancock & Moore, the Keeping Room, and too much background.

Feel free to substitute "couch" for "sofa" as needed. My grandmother used to refer to them as "Davenports" and "Chesterfields", which I thought was hilarious.

Simply put, we needed to replace the sofa in our family room. The sofa, if I recall correctly, was only about eight years old and was already sagging and sinking badly, and we didn't sit on the sofa as much as sit in it. I realized that we tended to replace our furniture every 8 years or so not because we wanted a different look, but because the furniture was worn out and sad-looking. We don't beat on our furniture--we have only daughters for crying out loud.

The overwhelming majority of furniture purchased in Michigan are sales at the Art Van chain of furniture stores or their chief rival, Gardner White. Each feature the lower end "names" like Natuzzi and Lazy Boy and Lane, as well as thousands of "no-name" pieces of furniture. Furniture that looks good on the outside, but doesn't last very long. Almost everyone buys their furniture at one of these two merchants. I'm serious--if someone mentions needing furniture, you can assume that they will be going to Art Van and will price-check at Gardner White. Of course, maybe we're just in the wrong income bracket.

With regard to leather furniture, everyone (except us) has a leather sofa from Art Van. Unless it says, "Natuzzi" on it, it will always be from an unknown manufacturer. The leather sofa will be black painted leather stretched over a highly uncomfortable frame. The whole sofa will be very light-weight. No one ever cares to find out who or where the piece was made. All they care about was the low price and/or financing they could get for this "leather sofa." I didn't want one of these and I didn't want to deal with Art Van or Gardner White ever again.


For upscale furnishings, there is Gorman's. They have a few stores in Michigan and they carry Hancock & Moore, Stickley, Bradington and Young and other high-end names. They advertise in the Sunday supplements in the newspapers, and of course, always have a 50 percent off sale going.

Our visit there was mercifully short. In today's economy in Michigan, the store was a mausoleum and the female employees were having a comfortable gabfest at the front of the store upon our arrival. I felt that we were intruding at their Fortress of Solitude. They gave us leave to walk around and see what we liked. We walked around and really didn't know what we were seeing and never learned what was possible in terms of ordering a piece of furniture in a particular leather. Fortunately for me, my wife wasn't wowed by anything in the store. And I wasn't wowed by the professionalism of the employees--I got the impression that they weren't very enthused and were just biding their time at this store to get a paycheck. We walked out of there knowing as little about quality furniture as when we went in. As a side note, my aging mother visited Gorman's looking to purchase a fabric sofa recently. She was as unimpressed by the experience as I was although her perspective is greatly different from mine.

We visited three other "upscale" furniture stores and didn't find anything great. We almost settled on a Flexsteel Latitudes couch and chair, which seemed okay. The salesman really wanted us to buy off the floor and warned of long wait times if we wanted something different. We told him we would think about it and took his card. As we had conducted all these furniture forays in one day, we returned home tired and generally dismayed at our results.

I hit the internet for help. I needed to learn what makes a good sofa and who tends to make good sofas. I found a list of manufacturer rankings. I found that the Natuzzi, La-Z-Boy and Lane furniture, all of whom enjoy a great reputation for quality here in Michigan, were considered "budget" or "promotional" quality--the lowest rung on the ranking sheet. Flexsteel was middle of the road. Wow. Although a lot of this list could only be opinion, it was based on 30 years in the industry and I believed there must be some basis of truth here. Here's the website: http://www.leatherfurnitureshoppe.co...urer_rank.html if you are interested. Again, it's not gospel, but the scales fell from my eyes, so to speak.

So who could build a sofa of enduring quality for us? A piece of furniture that could last us 30 years, instead of 8? A sofa where someone had taken some pride in their work? A sofa that didn't sag in the middle like a sway-backed horse and maybe one where I didn't wish there was a rope hanging in front of me to help me get out of the damn thing? It didn't have to be heirloom quality, it just had to hang together for 20 years or so.

I found some recurring references about furniture advice in a gardening forum of all places and then landed smack dab in "My Furniture Forum". The website has it all and I haven't found anything like it anywhere. Thoughtful articles explaining what quality is and where it is found. Tells me where some of the brands I thought were American-made are actually being built. How furniture manufacture in North Carolina had been decimated in quite the same way as industrial manufacturing had here in Michigan. We never knew.

I read a lot of answers by Duane Collie, whose command of the written English language is increasingly rare nowdays. I once rented a cottage based solely upon the advertisement in the classified section of the newspaper. I knew anyone who would phrase himself as precisely as that would keep a nice cottage. We rented there fifteen years in a row--until my kids were too old to want to isolate themselves in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a week at a time anymore. In Duane, we find a guy who has been in the industry a long time, who has honest and open opinions and insightful answers. More of an advocate for quality furniture than a salesman. I'm still trying to find that in a car salesman.

Long story short, I read a couple dozen threads. After that, I just needed to ask a few questions before submitting an order for a Kodiak sofa and Sullivan glider rocker, both in Columbia Butternut. Sight unseen, never sat in either, and a guy I've never met several states away running my credit card for a product that wouldn't arrive for a minimum of twelve weeks. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but instead our furniture arrived today and we couldn't be happier.

In closing, the most difficult part will be explaining to our next-door neighbors, who did buy a Flexsteel Latitude sofa, and the rest of our family and friends, many of whom own a no-name spray-painted black leather sofa, why our new furniture is inherently superior to theirs without sounding too prideful.

Duane, your business card should read, "Furniture Advocate". Thanks for the buying experience!


Sincerely,

David & Anna Wahla
Shelby Township, MI

If we're talking about Michigan....

I can't really argue about Art Van. I was out for dinner with my wife a couple of years ago and, as they had a store across the parking lot, suggested we stop in to see what they had to offer. The lighting in the store is dim, so it's difficult to get a good sense of their furniture. They're happy to move stuff around for you, and will try to sell you furniture protection packages for anything you buy (the online reviews suggest that you won't have much luck getting repairs or replacement if problems arise, but if you read this forum you would anticipate that). The furniture seems to be mostly imported from China, and I saw what seemed to be a lot of veneers, softwood and indeterminate wood species and thick, sprayed-on finishes that obscure the quality of the wood and manufacture.

There's another local furniture store that offers more mid-range quality name brands, although once you've seen some of the case goods Duane offers it's difficult to look at anything in the mid-range without finding fault. They offer a line of semi-custom office furniture that triggered one of my pet peeves - the display model had a misaligned drawer front. I am personally skeptical that any manufacturer will do a better job with the furniture you order than they will do with their floor models - the stuff that's supposed to make you want to buy from them. I like the salespeople there, they seem to know their furniture and they're not high pressure, but now that Duane has turned me into a furniture snob they have an uphill battle to get my business. ;)

You can, of course, do far worse than Art Van. There's a furniture store closer to where I live that has been intermittently being "going out of business" (with lots of fine print to the effect that they're not actually going out of business) pretty much since it opened. Its prices are comparable to Art Van's, perhaps higher; it's quality ranges from about the same to much worse. If you look at their online reviews, their service is even worse than their quality. Bottom feeders. My wife and I stopped in once to check them out; despite having been "forced to liquidate" at that point for several weeks their floor was completely full. The salesperson told us that if we didn't like what we saw we could special order. We were urged to make up our minds quickly because "we don't know how long we'll be here; the owner could close us tomorrow." Technically true, I suppose, but intentionally misleading. The Art Van experience was enough to put my wife off of impulse shopping, particularly after I pointed out some of the quality issues.... After that we watched the cycle of signs going up and down, liquidation, transfer of the business, etc. - anything to lure in marks.

I haven't made it to a Gorman's. Their stores are a bit too far away from Ann Arbor for a casual visit, and I've not been inspired to make a special trip.

The local furniture store I patronize is a small, independent store in Chelsea, Merkel Furniture. They carry some quality brands, along with some mid-range brands, and they steer away from the junk. They will happily tell you which pieces are made in Michigan, New York, elsewhere in the U.S., or in Asia. The salespeople actually do want relationships with their customers, and they don't try to poach each other's clients (quite the opposite). Like many other furniture stores they're under stress from the recession, but they seem to have adapted their business model for the longer haul, and they're very patient about helping customers select and personalize custom orders.