All this schlock and not a decent couch to faint on

My limbs felt impossibly heavy and my head had tightened dangerously against my brain. I was feverish to flee this aesthetic assault. To rip, not run, as fast and as far as my leaden legs would take me, past the hurly-burly of hundreds, no thousands, no, tens of thousands of retail buyers and sales reps navigating the 11.5 million square feet of showrooms in High Point, N.C. Hordes of them, looking to network and sign deals as they do every spring and every fall at this, the largest furniture and accessories market in the world.

Only 21 hours here in this Southern industry town, where I’d come to check out the new designs for 2005 at the International Home Furnishings Market (IHFM), and already I was in an existential malaise, lost in a hostile and unforgiving universe. Or, in High Point terms, lost in a consumer-unfriendly maze of dreck, the unnourishing visual equivalent of Twinkies. Brass hardware with a sheen tinnier than my laminated press badge and brightly yellow as a young egg yolk. Leather with the waxy texture of a milk carton. Wood finishes with the flat complexions of lifelong vegans, or deader than Elvis.

“What’s this material?” I asked a floor rep about a pricey blackish cabinet with a strangely pulverized-then-vinylized-and-rubberized appearance. I thought it might be some new synthetic product based on plastic, the kind of thing that would be called, say, plastical, to semi-rhyme with practical, or maybe fanplastic, to suggest, you get it, fantastic.

“Wood,” he said, puzzled at my question. “Well, wood veneer, actually. It’s distressed.” Not nearly as distressed as I.

Authenticity, show me a little authenticity here in this tourist bazaar cum neighborhood street fair cum McMansion showcase. Just something, any old thing, that looks remotely hand-hewn or touched by a human hand other than the packer or pillow fluffer. Something inventive. Not these products that seem to have been spit out by some bad-taste computer from Vegas. Not these garish, ghoulish “Tiffany” lamps, not these assembly-line “tapestries,” not these “Oriental” rugs, not this gift shop “fine art.” Not these collections by celebrity “designers,” these musicians and models and athletes and talk show hosts. Please, furnishings manufacturers of America: Don’t make me have to keep using these qualifying quotation marks.

Surely someone has made a corny joke about High Point actually being Low Point, but if not, let me be the first. How could they inflict this inferior stuff on poor mainstream American buyers, I demanded, but only to myself. Quickly followed by: I can’t believe somebody made this. I’m generalizing, of course, because, in general, it really was that frightful, that insipid, that ... insulting.

Design deeply affects our daily lives -- everything, after all, is designed, everything -- so what, on a subliminal level, is this mass production of second-rate merchandise doing to our aesthetic values over time? Which raises other questions:

Why are there so many ugly objects in America?

Why are so many of them in High Point?

Why are these ugly objects being force-fed to the consumer as desirable?

Why do we settle for bad design when there’s so much good design out there? Lowered expectations and bottomed-out standards? But maybe we’re getting smarter. Maybe the nearly four-year stagnancy in furniture sales -- while home sales soar -- is a mass revolt of savvier consumers -- we’re as mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore. “There’s been an overall redundancy of styles that has just gotten boring and overwhelming,” says furniture industry analyst Jerry Epperson. “Everybody has the Louis Philippe look. I don’t know who Louis Philippe is -- or was -- but I’m damned tired of him.”

Memo to old boy network manufacturers: Why can’t -- or won’t -- you do better, take a few styling risks, especially at the prices you charge? Is it because numbers-crunching salesmen-turned-CEOs make so many of the important decisions about what gets designed?

Is paltry vision and poor quality what our unbridled consumerism hath wrought?

Is it us or is it them?

Does anyone have any spare Prozac? Cognac? Ovaltine, perhaps?

Rob Forbes, the San Franciscan who started the phenomenally successful California-based Design Within Reach (which features classic and new modern designs, mostly European) went to High Point in the late ‘90s to see what was going on in the U.S. design and furniture industry. “What I found there was largely what I’d heard,” he said. “It was an outdated industry where people were focusing more on cheaper prices than quality. There were no designers there. And no one was really interested in working with me. So I beat a path to Europe, and I’ve never turned back since. There are some good manufacturers in the U.S. But the disconnect you see at High Point with designers and modern design is extreme.”

I tried, let me tell you how hard I tried, to find something to love, and -- failing that -- something to like, and -- failing that -- something innovative, even if I hated it. There were “new” collections galore, but they came off as newly produced rather than actually new, a business necessity to keep the bucks coming in. Certainly not -- heaven forbid we have unreasonable expectations -- cutting edge. That wouldn’t be reaching for the moon; that, in High Point, would be reaching for Mars. Best to stay with the reassuring, derivative designs, these ersatz 18th and 19th century styles, the carved cherubs and grapes. I was beginning to sound like a walking, bastardized Jefferson Airplane lyric: When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy that’s within you dies ... Don’t you want some sofas to love/don’t you need some armchairs to love/wouldn’t you love some tables to love/you’d better find just one thing to love.

By the end of the second day, I’m pleased to report, I had found not just one thing to love, but three or four: Martha Stewart’s model rooms; fresh, zesty lights and rugs by a native of Israel, Liora Manne; hand-loomed rugs from several companies based on tribal motifs, nature and modern and pop art; the African Kuba ceremonial cloths and 400-year-old wedding baskets sold by Zambia-born Californian Bridget Meyer from a tiny booth-like space for her import company, Toka.

By the end of the third day, I had found five or six things to like a lot, along with that many more inspiring vignettes to grace my search: at Bernhardt Furniture, Stewart’s cast metal Windsor chairs (the first time I’ve been drawn to the style); at Hickory Chair, a Mariette Himes Gomez mirrored side table, very Hollywood glam; and a Thomas O’Brien bookshelf that wrapped around a sofa (both Gomez and O’Brien are actual interior designers); at Santos Collection, polished river rocks in a five-foot-long palm husk; at Barclay Butera, an oceanic swirl of white pencils in a huge sterling bowl; at Rowe Furniture, the Mini Mod sofa designed for condos and apartments; at San Franciscan Eric Brand’s temporary showroom, a leather concert chair that could be strapped on the back; at the Italian showroom Doimi, a kicky orange leather chair.

The blessed relief of really good Italian furniture, mostly leather, reminded me of why the yearly Milan Furniture Fair is where the designerati go. (“Once you’ve been to Milan, or Paris, or New York,” says L.A. interior designer Jenny Armit, “you can’t believe how dated High Point is. It’s 20 years behind.”) It was after seeing several Italian sofas, in fact, that I was also reminded of the cozy intelligence of a well-designed sectional. (Italians do it best.)

What I would have pulled out my wallet for -- the real test -- were Meyer’s Kuba cloths and the original works of Manne, especially the rugs and lighting fixtures made from a technique she invented called Lamontage. She needle-punches custom colored fibers by hand, layering and interlocking them in a robust and painterly fashion.

Where I would have moved in and lived for the duration, if I could, was in the Martha Stewart Signature collection at Bernhardt Furniture -- or, to be more precise, the several model rooms her design team set up that constituted an entire house. In a matter of 15 minutes, I became a committed Martha Stewart convert. Seeing her aesthetic first-hand on such a large scale, I realized how much she has done to show middle America that it doesn’t have to settle for the substandard; to show that taste is available, and affordable, and that we decorate our homes piece by piece, room by room, not in a fell swoop with those over-matched suites too much in evidence at High Point.

She understands scale and proportion, color, layering of textures, the necessity of creating visual rhythms. There was more to be learned about decorating from the three “Ask Martha” questions on the back page of her hand-out mini-catalog than in most of the showrooms at the market, combined. (Unless it’s the lesson they teach of what not to do.)

I’m going to give Worst in Show awards to the celebrity-quote-unquote-designers, and it’s pretty much a tie between Univision media star Cristina Saralegui’s “Latino-inspired” Casa Cristina Collection for Pulaski Furniture and Steve Tyrell’s Southern Roots collection for Pennsylvania House, roots he ought nobly to have kept buried underground like those of an old oak. The Saralegui-endorsed furniture -- a counterfeit confusion of styles from Europe to South America to Cuba to Miami -- reflects the long, rich history of Latin artistry and design about as much as a bean burrito reflects real Mexican cooking.

I might well have thrown former Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway into the mix had I seen his home entertainment for Basset Furniture. But as the poet and visionary William Blake said in so many words, you have to know what’s more than enough to know what’s enough. This was enough, already.

Let me echo the words of New Orleans jewelry and furniture designer Anne Pratt: “For $3 million, I wouldn’t go back to High Point. It was exhausting. It was tacky. It was worthless.” On second thought, let me make a slight revision. For $3 million, I would go back, fee nonnegotiable.

I’ve never been so glad to return to Los Angeles, and never so giddy proud to live in this mecca of free-wheeling creativity and forward-thinking design.