I hate to be mean, but this may in fact be the ugliest piece of furniture I’ve ever seen.
This is a hand-painted chest that retails for a cool $7,800 from the Mackenzie-Childs Company in Aurora, New York. My mother, who lives in upstate New York, had warned me about this company, but words failed to give me an adequate picture of the kind of god-awful design we are dealing with here. I pulled a catalog out of the mailbox the day before yesterday and slapped my forehead. Now I see what she was talking about! I wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen it with my own eyes!
The company calls this little item a “Belvedere Bombay Chest”. (And here I thought the term was bombe, from the French.) By their own admission, the makers have applied no fewer than five decorative techniques to create this mind-bogglingly awful thing: “marbleized painted top, decoupaged flowers, gesso stripes, mirror mosaic front, and seashell encrusted foot board.” Not to mention the opalescent drawer pulls, silver rococo carvings and gilt bun feet. Wow. It’s so over-the-top awful it achieves a kind of legendary quality.
How does one even conceive of something like this? Does one of the M-C “artisans” just start painting and keep adding stuff at random until the whistle blows at the end of the day? “I know—a mirrored mosaic will really add that special something to this piece!”
I asked my mother, who’s been to the company headquarters, who was buying this stuff. I wanted to know, did they look crazy? She said no. They just looked like they had more money than they knew what to do with. Well, obviously. Then she told me the capper. This manufacturer has achieved cult status because of patronage by a small circle of taste-setting entertainment industry luminaries. Among them, Rosie O’Donnell. Well, say no more.
