Shortly after our arrival in LA, I went on a Craigslist­ing spree to get rid of some extra­ne­ous fur­ni­ture. One piece, a vin­tage metal cart that I’d bought in New York a bil­lion years ago, was pur­chased by a guy who asked if we were sell­ing any­thing else. At that point, most of the good stuff was gone, but our din­ing chairs had been bum­ming us out for a while. We’d bought them from a retired fire­fighter in Miami who told us they had been in his sta­tion until its ren­o­va­tion. They needed a lit­tle TLC but we fig­ured we could han­dle it. They looked like this:
Image of Thonet chair (Want them? 1stdibs, $3,500. We paid…um, a thirty-fifth of that.) They were cute, yes, but not ter­ri­bly com­fort­able. Hav­ing din­ing chairs you don’t really want to sit in ensures that you will eat every meal on your sofa.

Any­way, I offered the chairs to my poten­tial buyer for about what we paid for them and he said yes. Yay, chairs gone! But this left us with just one chair, Ryan’s Aeron, which, while com­fort­able, isn’t mak­ing the trip into our kitchen for din­ner time. And did I men­tion there’s one? So the sit­u­a­tion in our kitchen is a lot like this:

Poor din­ing table! It’s now func­tion­ing as a super-sized land­ing strip that’s also home to my vit­a­mins, a back­pack, my hand­bag and a fan. This sad­dens me.

Chairs are clearly in order. But the ones I’ve always envi­sioned sit­ting around this table are a lit­tle spendy.

Image of Eames, Jacobsen and Wegner chairs

I’ll be pray­ing to the Craigslist gods to bring us any of the above for way less, then hit­ting the flea mar­ket this week­end in hopes of find­ing some­thing. (Of course, if you have four awe­some chairs to sell and you’re dri­ving dis­tance from West LA, we should talk.) What’s your dream chair—and do you own it yet?