"Nonny" wrote in message
...


Back in the spring of 2002, we needed to replace a houseful of furniture,
following a fire. Most of the stuff destroyed was things I'd made or we
had accumulated over the years, including some very high end brand name
dining and bedroom furniture. A friend volunteered to help me find good
replacement furniture, since I was multitasking on a number of other
things at the time. He was a designer, working for one of the large,
prestigious design companies in a major CA city. I sent him photos of the
pieces and descriptions of what we hoped to replace as closely as possible
and he assigned the task of locating them to several of his home design
interns.

The email I got from him a couple weeks later essentially set out what had
happened in the country over the past few years before our loss. I wish
I'd saved it, but it said that his interns had visited a number of upper
end furniture stores and even a Furniture Mart looking for comparable,
commercially available pieces. They couldn't find any. The domestic
product had been reduced to lines and techniques that lent themselves to
rapid mass production and the Chinese built furniture, then flooding the
market, was very much hand made, hand carved and very, very much superior
to the domestic product.

What he told me, after more investigation, was that the furniture
manufacturers in the USA could simply not compete when it came to quality
AND any handwork. It something could be designed on a CAD system, with
cuttings that could be laid out by machine and with no real handwork, then
the difference in shipping cost might still give a slight edge to the
domestic product. Unfortunately, that product was very plain and was
usually in the lower end of the quality and design spectrum. OTOH, the
manufacturers could send a high end design over to manufacturers in China
and the product being returned in shipping containers was of incredibly
good quality, had most if not all detail hand carved and used solid woods
for most parts.

With that in hand, I personally visited several furniture stores and came
to about the same conclusion. We simply could no longer compete when it
came to making good furniture in the USA: the guy sitting at a bench with
a handful of carving tools in front of him, turning out rosettes at $.10
an hour was out producing the $8/hour guy in North Carolina in every way.

When it came time to buy our replacement furniture, we visited a large
chain and looked at what was available. Yup, there were two types: Made
in the USA and Designed in the USA but Made in China. The Chinese stuff we
saw was incredible from the standpoint of material, quality and
particularly craftsmanship. What we purchased for our living room, dining
room and bedroom would probably have cost $100,000 if made in North
Carolina. . . if it could have been made there at all. Sure, the joinery
was about the same, but every edge was hand carved, molding on the
headboard and footboard were hand carved and applied, fluting was hand
done, as was piping and other decoration. As a woodworker, I realized
that with the balance of my life ahead of me, I could never come close to
the craftsmanship in the decoration in what we purchased. The weight alone
was incredible: it took 2 big guys to carry the headboard alone up to the
bedroom and 4 men to take the dresser. The bed's never been moved since it
was set in place.

There is no reason anything you are talking about couldn't be made here, by
machine, and be as good, or better, quality wise. There is no doubt that it
would be more expensive but not as much as you seem to be saying.