The purpose of this post it to create a search hit for SWED-FORM, a Swedish manufacturer of furniture from the late 1960s. I came upon my SWED-FORM couch after perusing the free section of Craigs List in Oakland, CA. A couple had put their old couch at the curb and posted the CL ad. For the second time in a day, my good friend Melissa helped me out with her pick-up truck to scoop the 6.5′ beauty. When I got home, it was love at first nap. I have a history with corduroy couches, but the style of this SWED-FORM was unique. It’s dated chrome frame is rust-free and still shiny and the coruroy, while worn, is in pretty nice shape. No wine or love stains. There’s one cushion button missing, but that’s pretty much moot considering both sides of the cushion are functional. It could stand to be restuffed, but whatevs.
So this is where the story starts to gets interesting (IMHO). After a nap, I woke up and decided to do some research on the maker of the couch. My searches for SWED-FORM were almost entirely inconclusive. The only Google hit relavent to SWED-FORM furniture was another Craig’s List ad. Craig’s List ads usually run for about ten days and are then cached for another couple of weeks with the search engines even though a visitor can’t contact the repy email. This ad happened to be live. The chair was in Spokane, Washington. The pictures showed a perfect match to my couch–same color corudory and the chair seemed to be in excellent condition. I corresponded with the seller and we discussed shipping possibilities to get the sizeable piece of furniture to Oakland. Greyhound was proposed and I awaited the sellers next email. No email came, so I decided to check in with him once more. To my disappointment, the seller had sold the chair to a pretty cool looking record shop in Spokane for what he said was $400. Which was bologna because how the hell could a record shop in Spokane, WA command $400+ dollars for a chair with no documented value? The whole sitch reeked of horseshit. I attempted to call the shop a couple times and wrote an email to their website’s form. I spoke to and left a message with a slackass guy who didn’t know what I was talking about. And, regretfully, I sat on my hands about it thereafter.
I checked in with the record shop again today. If I’d understood that the shop was actually a seller of furniture, I might have been more aggressive in my pursuit of the chair. I thought they’d bought it from the CL seller as a fixture to keep in the store. Apparently, the chair sold months ago to a woman who bought a couple of other pieces. So, now all I have left is the hope that perhaps said woman will be searching the internet to find out about SWED-FORM some day and find this. Or maybe someone else has a matching chair. Or maybe someone will see this and make me an offer for my couch. I should mention that I didn’t really find it on the street in Oakland. That would be gross. It was purchased in a posh SoHo, NYC reseller for $1000 in 2009. And the previous single-owner was a Scandinavian man who only ever sat on it for an hour after church. I’ll let the couch go for $400. Ping me offline: j o h n @ e a r s h o t p r e s e n t s dot com.