guest post - the vintique object

Ugly is Contextual:  The Story of the Orange Sofa

Hello, readers of The Little Black Door.  I'm Camille of The Vintique Object and delighted to be here today to guest post for one of my favorite funny and talented bloggers.

So here's the story of the orange sofa. 

 If you saw this baby, what would you think?

Yeah, that's orange corduroy you see there.  

Would you think it's ugly?  I did.  But my shopping partner-in-crime Lane, of Urban Orchard Interiors, and I pride ourselves in being able to look past the ugly. We saw the above sofa with its nice lines and dreamed of transforming it into something like this:

 

 Wisteria's Natural Linen Settee

 So, on a whim, we bought it, planning to reupholster the thing for our shared booth at the once-a-month Alameda Antiques Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area.

But as luck would have it, not long after we purchased the sofa, one of my clients pinned this photo to our shared board on Pinterest:

Jonathan Adler's Templeton Apartment Sofa

And I thought, Wow, our orange sofa could be that!  So I went off in search of 'orange sofa' pictures on Pinterest and found some pretty amazing photos which you can see in a post here.  

Lane saw that post and we both knew we'd just need to clean it up and try to sell it as is.

You can see her on the left there in all her orange glory at our booth at the antiques flea market.  (Claremont Finders Keepers is my other blog and business.)

I tell you, I shook my head as we hoisted that thing into Uhaul the night before.  I was sure we'd be loading it back up at the end of the day.

But you wouldn't believe how much interest our orange sofa got.  And about half way through the day it sold for a healthy profit.

Since the customer who bought it lived nearby, we agreed to deliver the sofa for a fee.  On the way over, I tried to imagine what her house would look like. It was really anybody's guess.

Well, here's what it looked like:

I tell you, if I had tried, I wouldn't have been able to imagine a more perfect place for our ugly-duckling-sofa-turned-swan to live.  (Get a load of those gorgeous curtains!)

If you are a reader of The Little Black Door, I'm betting you've got the thrifting/DIY gene somewhere in you.  Which is why I've told you this story.

The more of The Orange Sofa story is this:  Sometimes we spend so much time looking for things to transform -- to make beautiful, that we fail to imagine them in a different context.   That was certainly the lesson I learned with our little ol' orange sofa.

However...sometimes things are just ugly. 

Elizabeth, hope you are having a restful and fun time while you are gone. Thanks for having me!