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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Might there be a shift in how we think about furniture? You used to run into people who'd have stuff that was passed down the generations, and not just in wealthy homes. It seems to have been a necessity for poor young couples, and a lot of old stuff seems to have been hand crafted.

Nowadays, you can change every piece of furniture in the house for a few hundred bucks. There's constantly something new at IKEA, and you don't want to care if the kid scratches your dining table. You also want it to be easy to clean, and if you're moving house you can just throw out the old stuff.

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There's a change in how people think about furniture, driven by high real estate prices. A grand piano costs more in floor area in major cities than it actually does to buy.

It's also clearly very fashion-driven. Wait until everyone's gone IKEA modernist, and you'll see the pendulum start to swing back again.

Yeah, I agree with your pendulum. I noted a WaPo article above that is hinting at that swing citing the mixing of old and new as a rising trend:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/apartment-ther...

Plus, if you look at some of the most sought after stuff -- e.g., Anthropologie furniture -- it's all throw back to old era. It seems to be as much about the ways in which people shop (online vs at brick and mortar) as it is purely about changes in taste.

> if you're moving house you can just throw out the old stuff.

At my college (UT Dallas), we had on-campus apartments. Not dorms, but an actual apartment complex on campus.

The best place for new residents to acquire furniture was by the dumpsters. It turns out that most people moving out would just chuck half their furniture and leave it by the dumpster. Every year from May to August, there would be copious amounts of furniture at the dumpsters. If you were a new resident, you were quickly told that the best way to acquire a couch was to head over to the nearest dumpster and take what you see.

I attended UTD from 2003 to 2007; I don't know if things have changed since.

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