Vanity of Vanities : Furniture Shopping Can Become a Serious Life Challenge for a Person of Humble Tastes
I DIDN’T WANT much. Just a small, simple vanity for the bathroom. I pictured it quite clearly: a plain, unobtrusive white cabinet with flat doors and a couple of drawers. I was willing to spend a reasonable amount of money to get something attractive. It didn’t seem like the impossible dream.
But there I was, standing in a warehouse the size of an airplane hangar, feeling like a shrunken-down Alice in Homeownerland. Buffeted by frantic shoppers pushing colossal carts, I surveyed a line of vanities that stretched out to the crack of doom. I could get an Early American piece of junk, a French Provincial piece of rebut, or a Spanish Colonial piece of basura.
“Vanity, thy name is ugly,” said my husband, Duke.
Suddenly, I spied what looked like a sleek white vanity a quarter-mile down the aisle. Sure enough, it was the only non-wood-veneered unit in the place. It was streamlined and practical; there were plenty of drawers, a gray Formica top, a white enamel sink and snappy chrome faucets that said “hot” and “cold.”
It turned out this vanity was sold a la carte. I flagged down a bored salesman, who was cruising the aisle on a giant forklift. “How much?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, yawning. “I missed that class.” He probably missed arithmetic, too, or he could have added up the various parts and arrived at a sum large enough to buy a round-trip ticket to the Milan furniture mart for me and a one-way ticket back for the vanity that I’d buy there.
Actually, I would have gladly gone to Italy, but I didn’t have time. The contractor was coming in a week to fix a rotted hole in our bathroom floor. He had to rip out our old vanity, which was why we were frantically searching for a new one.
I realize that this may not sound like a major problem, especially if you compare it to serious life challenges such as finding a parking space in Westwood on a Saturday night. But I’m the kind of person who is politely called “sensitive about her environment” and impolitely called “picky.” I’ve bought everything in the house--from my computer to the garbage can--because I thought it was cute. And frankly, something called a vanity should be cute.
Usually when I go shopping, I can find one or two cute models amid the chaff--a microwave oven without wood grain (why must appliances look rustic?) or fireplace utensils that aren’t cheapened with shiny, embossed brass. But I couldn’t find a single vanity that didn’t look like it came out of the Sleepy Time Motel. And I looked in a lot of places, enough to speculate that vanities are a black hole in American mass marketing.
Finally, I found myself meandering around a Designer Quality Bath Furnishings Showroom, gaping at flushable, drainable works of art such as a majestic pedestal sink in “Pompeii Lava,” which looked like an altar font and sold for an ungodly figure. Not that I wanted it, or the porcelain washbasin with the hand-painted flowers and the matching hand-painted (why?) toilet bowl. I was just killing time, waiting for the showroom’s 27-year-old power-bobbed bath investment counselor to call my number and reveal how much the plain white vanity in the corner cost. (For some strange reason, there were no price tags on any item less than $1,000).
“You’re probably looking at about $300 or $400,” she said, adding that this didn’t include a sink ($100 plus), a top ($300 plus), faucets ($150 plus) or even drawer pulls ($10 plus). Still, I was desperate. The contractor was coming in three days. “You’re probably looking at about a four- to six-week wait,” she warned me.
She was probably looking at an emotional breakdown.
“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity,” Duke said when I returned home despondent.
But, happily, all is not vanities. The next day, we found a chic little bath and tile shop that had an acceptably adorable, acceptably affordable, red and white pedestal sink in stock. Of course that means we won’t have any storage space . . . .
I don’t want much. Just a small simple medicine chest for the bathroom.
