On Day 3 of the International Home Furnishings Market, the world's largest retail furniture expo, buyers hurrying between showroom buildings paused while the skies darkened and the temperature dropped. A funnel cloud that someone reported at the city limits never did touch down, but weather remained on everyone's mind.
Retailers from the Northeast and Midwest arrived at the semiannual market after a disastrous winter of record snowfalls. Continued consumer caution and the rumble of higher interest rates did not improve their mood."Our business was basically devastated for three months," said Elliot Rubin, who opened the New York area's first La-Z-Boy store in Cedar Grove, N.J., in November.
Shipments of new furniture in the $48.7 billion industry were down 2 percent in the first two months of this year, the American Furniture Manufacturers Association said.
This spring, it was a "Waiting to Exhale" market without clearly developed trends. The 2,300 showrooms generally displayed a kind of end-of-millennium nostalgia. A shift toward yellow-green and dark finishes evoked the 1940s, the '50s, the '60s and even the '70s.
Mohair, tweed and chrome (the last used lavishly by Ralph Lauren in a $15,885 four-poster bed and an $8,265 trestle table for Henredon), threatened to return. Even "Mediterranean," a word all but banned from the design lexicon for two decades, was back, most notably in Thomasville's 115-piece Renaissance Collection of ornate, large-scale furniture. Goods ordered at the April market will not appear in stores until the fall.
Along with the color shift came a definite tilt toward Europe, away from Shaker, Mission and other American designs of the past few years. France was the country of choice, but the design menu was more Julia Child than Brillat-Savarin.