Curios-ity

At first glance, nothing curious here... right...?

Do you have a china cabinet in your home?

Probably not, right?  Even if you're used to calling that piece of furniture a curio cabinet, or a hutch, you probably still don't have one.  At least, not one made of wood in a traditional style with mirrors and stuff.

For decades, they were all the rage in fashionable homes.  Yet I had no idea how far out of fashion they've fallen until I received a set of them for free.

A long-time neighbor had passed away and her heirs sold her house.  Their mother's home had five bedrooms and three living areas traditionally decorated with big furniture, most of which had been selected by an actual interior decorator.  Between close family members and friends, heirs parceled out nearly all of that furniture - with the exception of an enormous three-piece china cabinet set.  

Before the house hit the market, heirs scheduled a large local charity to come and take what nobody'd wanted.  Yet even the charity - which gladly took even a chair that was in pieces - passed on the solid china cabinet set!  

That's when you know something really is unwanted.

The heirs' Realtor showed the house with this set still in its place in the family room, near the fireplace.  The home's new owners bought it with the set in place, but they didn't want it either.  And the day before their contractors were to begin an extensive remodeling project, the new matron of the house texted me:  Did I know anybody who wants this china cabinet set?  It's so heavy and well-made, she hated to simply have her workers haul it to the dumpster being delivered to their driveway tomorrow.

Yeah, each piece is oversized, extremely heavy, and still in excellent condition.  But I'm not an interior design wonk, and I don't really know what's stylish these days, so I had no idea that the whole china cabinet thing was currently so far out of style.  While our new neighbors told me their previous home had featured similarly traditional furniture, they weren't bringing any of it over to their new place, planning instead to pivot towards a more streamlined minimalism.  And glass-door, glass-shelved wood china cabinets with carved flowers really didn't fit their target aesthetic.

Apparently, units like these don't really fit anybody's aesthetic anymore.  I've looked online and discovered people can't even give away unwanted china cabinets!  Decades ago, these behemoths often sold for four figures.  But that was then.

And that's the thing, right?  Most conventional, traditional china cabinets scream 1980's and 1990's.  Hey - I admit it:  They just look dated.  I'm guessing these free ones from across the street were purchased during the 1980's.  And frankly, I'm not crazy about them.  

But my mother loves them!

Which works, because I got them for her anyway.  I didn't realize she'd always wanted a china cabinet until I mentioned to her about our new neighbors trying to unload a set.  It caught me off-guard when Mom jumped at the chance.  So with the help of another neighbor and his teenaged son, I went and lugged the three units over here, and two of them fit exactly along a wall between our dining area and kitchen.

Back in 1965, after they'd gotten married, Mom and Dad were setting up housekeeping in their small apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.  They found a furniture store along the neighborhood's long-time shopping district, 86th Street, and purchased - among other things - a tall, colonial-style hutch.  We still have it - a high shelving unit without doors sitting above a cabinet with doors.  It's all solid wood. 

I think Mom once kept her Readers Digest books (talk about transient fads!) on that doorless hutch, but for most of its life, it has displayed her curios.  The problem with that has been... dust, right?  Curios generally are the most valuable when one purchases them, or are gifted them.  After that, they sit about collecting dust, and without glass doors to help minimize the dust accumulation, the whole thing pretty much becomes a housekeeping issue.

As they almost always do, Mom's curios represent her generation, and what her generation prized or considered collectible or nostalgic.  But younger people today are literally a different generation, and while they may bristle at the notion, they accumulate curios as well... but ones that relate to their experience.  And on the flip side, Mom's curios are probably unlike what previous American generations would have valued and collected.

Cups and saucers, for instance.  For much of the 20th Century, when couples got married, one of the big things was picking out a china pattern that would represent a certain aesthetic dignity for the newly-created family unit.  Stemware, silver flatware, linen tablecloths:  Brides-to-be used to agonize over their choices of those prized entertainment accoutrements.  And then after being gifted them as wedding presents, what ended up happening?  All that fancy table livery that wasn't damaged in automatic dishwashers was relegated "for best" to china cabinets, or even closets.

Mom's wedding china is still in several kitchen cabinets.  And for decades, she also had in her kitchen cabinets a number of old serving dishes, pitchers, and platters from her mother and grandmothers.  Although I have no particular emotional attachment to them, I knew Mom did, and I wanted her to be able to see them on a daily basis.  What's the point of having sentimental pieces if they sit behind opaque cupboard doors all the time?

So I got them out and stocked Mom's new china cabinets with them, and today they bring back happy memories for her every time she gazes at them from our dining table.

You may recall me mentioning earlier about there originally being three large pieces over at our neighbors' place.  One features glass doors, glass shelving, a mirrored back, and built-in lights at the top.  The second has glass shelves and lights, but no doors or mirrored back.  I was amazed we didn't crack the mirror or damage any of the glass in our move.  Those are the two pieces I kept to display Mom's stuff, as seen in the photo above.

The third unit was strictly an entertainment center, but it was designed ages ago for cathode-ray television sets, meaning its opening was square, not rectangular.  So I immediately decided we couldn't use it, and I didn't even bother to offer it for free on an Internet give-away app.  I disassembled it, and its parts are stacked in the garage, since they're big pieces of genuine and engineered wood that I keep telling myself some woodworker might be able to creatively repurpose.

And yeah, talking about the evolution of transience:  That boxy TV armoire was positively obsolete!  Imagine all the towering entertainment centers from the 1970's through the early 2000's which became forever outmoded with the arrival of flat-screen TVs.  That's why I disassembled the one we were gifted - which, for the record, my late neighbor had retrofitted.  She'd hired a carpenter and Best Buy's Geek Squad to accommodate her large flat-screen, which stretched awkwardly from the unit's cavernous hole intended for cathode-ray sets.

In fact, retrofitting old furniture has become something of a thing for some people.  We have neighbors who enjoy repurposing second-hand and otherwise dated furniture with new paint and hardware.  But they didn't want that old entertainment center, either.

Meanwhile, there's only a few pieces of china in Mom's pre-owned china cabinet, and they're not her wedding china, but custom tea sets friends gifted her while she was in college.  There are some Finnish glass art pieces, and some crystal vases, but the rest are from Mom's maternal kinfolk.

Mom's mother and grandmothers were not wealthy, and the pieces Mom has of theirs probably have no financial value.  But those were remarkable women who lived hard lives and made a lot out of not very much for their families.  What their remaining artifacts represent to Mom is worth considerably more than whatever these china cabinets ever cost new.  

And when it comes to value, perhaps the fact that they're now displayed in these almost entirely unwanted curio cabinets completes the motif:

Old relics being displayed in newer old relics.

Isn't that curio-us...!

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