(I wrote this post from the chair, in fact.) Both are now two decades old, a little patinated but still not bad looking. It’s next to an armchair that I waited out, lurking for literally two years, until it was finally marked down far enough. My own sofa came from there, and it cost about the same as it might have at a mass-market retailer like Crate & Barrel. In truth, the assortment of absurdly priced coasters and similar baubles is somewhat of a mirage, because once you get upstairs to the somewhat more conventionally displayed furniture or linens, there is actually quite a lot of medium-affordable stuff. It’s a commonplace to say that ABC is really expensive, and that you shop there but rarely buy. You experienced a certain pure glee in that presentation, expressed by the designers of the space - my long-ago colleague Linda Hall did a splendid job getting them down on paper in 1995 - and subsequently absorbed by their customers.
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Literally no detail is too small: I remember at one point they had hundreds of tiny low-wattage light bulbs hanging from the (I’m guessing) 22-foot ceiling on twisty, extra-thin 18-foot cords, so that each one illuminated a display down at your sternum level, intimately. The implicit message of the place is that the Weinrib- Cole family (ABC’s multigenerational owner-operators) and their staff have shopped the world, brought home this maximalist array, and presented it as an amusement park for your eye, your wallet, and your house. It’s the kind of furniture store where you would not be surprised to encounter a gong. Kilims underlay altars from Thailand alongside opalescent glass and incense burners and mid-century Czech light fixtures and tables extracted from ancient French farmhouses and on and on and on. The store’s signature is its luxury-goods-from-every-corner-of-the-world selection, and it’s arrayed in so many layers upon layers that your overwhelmed gaze never quite knows where to touch down. Well, what it all is - or was, if the worst comes to pass - is the performance of great retailing. The first time I wandered in, I was intimidated: This place seemed like the product of a madman. My wife once pointed out that you can barely figure out whether there’s a place to pay for anything.
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For you (okay, for me), a person raised in an environment where the most tasteful consumer goods tended toward modernist and sleek, a visit to ABC was one wallop to the retinas after another. It trains your eye, possibly without your mind’s even knowing that it was happening. It’s more the degree to which looking there was a created activity, built up like impasto on a canvas, thoroughly enveloping you, especially on the main floor. I don’t mean browsing - though it certainly is good for that - or people-watching, though it was a place where you can routinely see astonishing-looking couples of great affluence, and occasionally an actual supermodel. The great distinction of ABC Carpet & Home, I always thought, has been that it is such a good store for looking. This one would feel like a particularly loud wet thud. The Strand Book Store made it through, barely. The eternal Brooks Brothers store on Madison Avenue stands empty, ominously, after that company’s own bankruptcy. In two years, New York has lost Barneys, Century 21, Lord & Taylor.
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ABC is reportedly looking to work with partners to avoid a similar end, and God go with them. Barneys, after it slipped from the grasp of the Pressman family, stayed chic but lost its overwhelming edge of fabulousness one sensed a corporate hand gently pulling back the reins, and shopping there correspondingly became a little less of an extreme experience. Historically, that has been difficult for retailers that depend on being unique, over-the-top, and dependent on a founder or operator’s eccentric energy. You have to hope that ABC Carpet & Home, which declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week at the age of 124, can get through the process without ceasing to be itself.