HIGH POINT, N.C. — Get ready for a trip. Back to the past, with an eye on the future. Or vice versa.
This will be armchair travel, but the armchair has been redefined. And so have the dining room table, the sofa and just about any other piece of furniture you can think of. The lines of the chair are taut, less bulbous. The table is blond wood, with narrow aluminum inlays. The feet on the sofa are cast-metal in geometric forms.
Furniture-makers, gathered at the International Home Furnishings Market to sell their 1995 lines, want to take you back to the '50s while keeping you firmly anchored in the '90s. The result is space race-retro, and it works.
Think Marilyn Monroe with muscles - sensual, sleek, sinuous, supple and, of course, sexy. This is furniture for the new millennium; the best of the past, pared to its essence and recombined in elegant new ways for the future.
"The whole idea now is to disarm the overblown '80s. Just kind of clean up, get rid of the excess," says Ron Fiore, design director for Baker-Knapp- Tubb furniture showrooms. "You have to really plan it; you have to really control what you do."
The look was emphasized through the predominant use of ice cream colors - butterscotch, toffee, caramel, cafe au lait - and a strong preference for surfaces featuring just one or two strong, clean-lined accessories, such as a vase of calla lilies.
Which doesn't mean getting rid of everything you own and replacing it with something new. Because, if there was a second theme at the annual fall furniture market, it was the embrace of eclecticism, the mixing and matching of past and present.
"The high-tech versus country-style wars have been fought, just as the nuclear arms race was, with dollar bill upon dollar bill," said Peter Ayers- Tarantino, a Philadelphian and Baker's historic-design consultant, who was at the show.
"Who won? Traditional taste and historic design. What was new was what was old. What was old was what was new. It's historicism with a kick. Historicism with verve. Historicism with a new eye.
"Safe, happy rooms and perfect period rooms are old-hat," he said.
The trend was evident in traditional-furniture showrooms, such as Baker and Lane, where lines of historic reproduction furniture were presented with lighter finishes, less finicky detailing and contemporary fabrics.
