Enter The Safari

Hey! We moved the couch! That’s good progress on our road to making this place cozy. I can’t believe I live in a place with a room big enough to accommodate a floating couch with ease.

The big rooms are proving very hard to organize and decorate, and we actually tried about 3 different living room orientations over the weekend before getting tired of pushing couches and calling this fine for now.

If we’ve picked up on anything, it’s that we’ll need some mega furniture to fill this space, and I’m not talkin’ about a lot of little pieces, what we need are a few big pieces to help with the scale. For the living room, we’re already shopping for a big coffee table, keeping our eyes peeled for something vintage/mid-century/hardwood that will complement some of the more modern retail furniture–like a mega sectional–that we expect to acquire.

What we did happen upon recently, were a set of vintage safari chairs on Craigslist. In one of those late-night-email-the-seller-from-bed-in-glee moments, I set out to check them out for myself. It’s been a long time since I’ve allowed myself to indulge in Craigslisting, because in the last house we were really tight for space and buying something new would mean replacing what was already there.

Obviously, because the chairs are here and now situated in our mish-mashed living room, you can tell that we bought them, two of them in great condition for $80 total. From what I can tell, and I can’t find a lot of information about them online, is that these are 1940’s safari folding chairs with hardwood frames and pleather seats. It’s not real leather even though it looks and feels real, I know this because the underside of the seat is noticibly canvas, but we’re fine with that. Who knew they made great lookin’ pleather in the 1940’s?

The chairs were manufactured by Gold Medal Folding Furniture Company and really only needed a little bit of clean-up once we brought them home; Gold Medal is still in existence today, one of those iconic brands that has been around since 1892 and you’re probably used to seeing all over but never bothered to learn much about. They’re known for the original director’s chair, but apparently went rogue on occasion and made really stellar pieces, like these safari chairs.

One thing worth noting, there were scratches on the legs. Before getting down with diluted Murphy Oil Soap in water, I used the Pinterest-wild trick of rubbing a walnut along the scratches. True story, the oil in the walnut miraculously makes the scuffs vanish and disguises scratches, unless of course they’re gouges. They’re walnuts, not wood filler After using several pieces of chopped walnut from our own cupboard, I continued to disassembled the chairs and massaged the hardwood components peacefully, pleather and all, with a dampened rag.

They are legitimately folding chairs, which is both cool and a little uncommon for day-to-day living. What’s especially nice about these versus the modern director’s chair is that the back support shifts too, pivoting to provide extreme back comfort. It’s probably what sold us. I’m writing this post in one of them now. It’s amazingly contouring and comfortable for my slouching spine.

Now try hard to imagine them in a room with a different couch, a huge ottoman/coffee table, whiter walls, fewer exposed routers and modems, and light wood floors. Fitting. Right? Right. We have such a long way to go with this place.