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But tables and chairs are not dishes and towels. Can the same promise of low-cost quality be made for furniture that helped establish Target's reputation for better design and popularized Kmart's association with Martha Stewart? Or are the trade-offs too great when you're talking about selling a sofa for $299.99? High style has stepped into the ring with names like Thomas O'Brien, a founder of Aero, a fashionable New York design studio. Mr. O'Brien's 500-piece home furnishings collection, which arrived in Target stores this month, includes modern furniture and lighting from $49.99 to $499.99 At Kmart, Martha Stewart's Everyday has introduced an upholstered chair for $199.99 and a sofa for $299.99 in addition to other furniture and lighting. Essential Home, Kmart's house brand of furnishings, starting at $25, is now being designed by Lisa Schultz, a former Gap executive, and Matthew Morris, a former Donna Karan designer. And Wal-Mart is expanding its furniture group online, with contemporary collections intended for a younger customer who shops on the Internet, including coffee tables as low as $35.Mass-produced furniture is still an arena of wood substitutes, plastic laminates, spray dyes, factory machining, thin hardware and self-assembly.
Most big-box furniture is produced at low cost in South America or Asia.Will people buy furniture in big-box stores? In stores across the country, the answers were mixed. In Eagle Rock, a suburb of Los Angeles, Lacey Wagner, a 29-year-old nanny and design afficianada, bought a round $149.99 Thomas O'Brien table after seeing it in Domino magazine and then inspecting it at her local Target. "I don't think it looks as cheap as a lot of stuff for $150," she said. "It doesn't look as great as in the magazine, but nothing ever does." In Dallas, Duncan Carrington and Cameron Johnson, two 21-year-old students, said they loved Mr. O'Brien's round table, but at $149.99, cheap was still too steep. They took a pass on it. "All the really nice stuff is still too expensive," Mr. Johnson said.The House & Home section asked a custom furniture maker and antique restorer, Bart Cisek of New Day Woodwork in Glendale, N.Y., to walk through several stores with this reporter and examine the furniture. Mr. Cisek, who has been in his field for 14 years, and whose clients include designers like Peter Marino, spotted hits and misses and made points relevant to any piece in the universe of cheap furniture.
Reviewing Mr. O'Brien's collection at Target, Mr. Cisek stuck his head under the hood, cross-checking design with construction.At $399.99, Mr. O'Brien's two-tone console bureau had metal-slide hardware on the drawers, a mark of quality missing on most cabinetry at the big-box stores. But the wood, as was true of all the wood-colored furniture reviewed, whether chestnut or mahogany or cherry, was surface-dyed with sprayed lacquers, not stained. Any nicks or scratches will reveal raw wood. The rectangular cabinet was also not square; drawers didn't align and there were gaps between drawer and frame, exposing hardware.Mr. O'Brien's dining chair, at $129.99, impressed Mr. Cisek with its solid-wood front legs and bent-birch plywood rear legs. But a dropleaf dining table, at $299.99, had a mottled finish that was not a design element."You know why mass-produced pieces are usually matte?" Mr. Cisek asked, explaining why waxing Mr. O'Brien's dull-finish table wouldn't help. "You make it more shiny, and you're going to see even more imperfections you don't see now" in factory machining and material.
"The paint just peeled off right here," he said of chipping along a joint. Mr. Cisek explained that it could be an example of machine-cutting "without sharp blades," adding "it looks like they painted before they actually cut the piece."Online, Target described the bench as cherry hardwood. Based on weight and appearance, Mr. Cisek said he believed it was a core of a material like medium-density fiber, a popular pressure-glued fiberboard, with a painted oak veneer. Mr. O'Brien, through an assistant, said yesterday that he knew the bench was a composite with veneer, and that Target's online description was inaccurate and would be corrected.At Kmart, an Essential Home armoire, priced at $264.49, was a mongrel of materials, including cardboard (the back), plastic laminate (the top) and particleboard (the drawers). Screws attaching the drawers were problematic."When you have particleboard, it requires plugs for the screws," Mr. Cisek said. "I guarantee you, you don't have plugs under there.
What's going to happen is that they're going to get very loose very soon."Anyone considering cheap furniture as a cost-effective, temporary measure for something like a starter apartment would do well to carefully time the length of its stay. Without kid-glove care, Mr. Cisek said, much of it might not survive the first year, or at best, would require service.Martha Stewart's $299.99 sofa and $199.99 club chair have hardwood frames which are bolted, not glued, which could also become an issue over time, Mr. Cisek said. As bolts loosen, furniture develops a wobble.But Mr. Cisek, recognizing the expectation built into a low price, acknowledged that many of the pieces he looked at were everything they could be at the cost, and that customers understood the implicit contract in buying cheap furniture. It has curb appeal -- as in, that's where it might end up, without much remorse. Ultimately, shoppers and experts agreed, the decision will be a personal one. If a potential customer is pleased by the design, comfortable with the quality, the price is right, and the piece meets one's needs, then cheap is fine.
Customers should be aware that buying online, where handsome photographs enhance expectation and widen the divide between perception and reality, gets the goods to the door. But mild disappointment in a cabinet's quality might not push you to disassemble, repack and return it. On the floor of a Wal-Mart in the Los Angeles area, Nora Fields, a teacher's assistant, said she shopped for furniture there regularly and had purchased an entertainment center and bookcases. She added her Wal-Mart pieces have worn well and that she considered them a good value.In Denver, few people spoken to had heard of Thomas O'Brien, but for many Target was a preferred destination, in terms of style and quality.On Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, Edward Buerger and Holly Watson, who had seen the six-page article on Mr. O'Brien and Target in September's Elle Decor and hunted down the furniture, were looking at a sideboard. "I don't know, youlook at it in the pictures and it looks like it could be something nice -- not Design Within Reach, or anything like that, but when you actually see it in person it looks not so nice."
He added: "It's $400. Who comes to Target for that?"Retail analysts like Geoff Wissman, with Retail Forward, a market research firm in Columbus, Ohio, think that more serious furniture offerings at the big boxes could be a hard sell. Mr. Wissman said he thought that $300 was the high-water mark of what customers would spend -- Target, despite its campaign to trade up, being no exception.Mark McMenamin, a senior editor at InFurniture, a trade monthly, said that the learning curve for the big three, if they continue to pursue the category, would be steep."They want the volume without the headaches," he said. "I'm not sure they're willing to make the commitment it takes to sell and service furniture." Mr. McMenamin added that the influx of imports from China had resulted in "an amazing array of price points at traditional furniture stores.""There's a decent amount of 'look' for reasonable prices," he said, "which wasn't always the case."When Ikea sailed over from Sweden in 1985, it was the butt of jokes about cheap furniture.