Futuristic Luxury Furniture? Don't we have enough blogs about that?

Yes and no. Things that you use often should be quality and gently engage one's psyche in mild aesthetic and tactile fetishism. Besides your PC, your clothing, and your phone, that means your mundane objects; your chairs, tables, beds, closets, etc. This blog is dedicated to quality furniture that satisfies certain full spectrum criteria...




"But in THIS ECONOMY, shouldn't we conserve and use bricks and pieces of plywood we found in the gutter to conserve our finances, shouldn't we be sustainable, and live simply? Shouldn't we stop engaging in envious luxury fetishism that is more often gaudy than revolutionary and just augments our shallow materialist consumer culture? Shouldn't we stop focusing on the lifestyles of the oligarchs that most people will never be able to afford?"

Woah, woah there Rush Limbaugh, that argument pretty much borders on saying that the poor in US aren't that poor since they can afford television, electric power, and refrigeration to keep meat from spoiling. It's like saying that the lower class of today lives better in some respects than a king in medieval times and thus should be content with plastic furniture and mass produced toaster ovens. This blog is meant to break through that type of neo-luddite thinking and engage the reader with a visual furniture road towards The Jetsons style future without being another 'hey look at these private yachts, maseratis, and diamond encrusted watches' blog. This blog follows a strict criteria when it comes to futuristic luxury furniture and when it comes to the meaning of these words.

"What.. but I.. I didn't mean it like that... What is this criteria?"

As you might have guessed, the two primary characteristics are futuristic and luxury although these overlap most of the time. Often, luxury simply means a batch of high tech goods that will not be available to the public for a long time. An example is pre Model-T automobile, a cell phone in the 1980s, a flat screen television in 1990s, etc. One would be rather shocked to see the kitchen used by mansion staff of some forward thinking oligarchs in the 1890s in terms of it resembling a modern middle class kitchen today (cubist stainless steel and glass furniture, electric stoves with powerful quiet air intake pipes, walk in fridges, telephones connecting kitchen to master bedroom and study, electric lights throughout, magnetic strips to hold cutlery, etc). In other words, many Sharper Image gadgets have been around for over 100 years in non-mass produced form. As William Gibson put it nicely, "The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed".

Futuristic is thus a subset of luxury with luxury extending on a bellcurve from hyper efficient innovative piece of the future on one side to garish, impractical, and often blatantly pre-modern showy craftsmanship on the other (using a golden quill pen in the 21st century for example). This blog provides extension of current gadget/software fetishism into the realm of the seemingly mundane.

"I understand that but my issue here is with the other gaudy, broadly useless aspects of luxury in the often ridiculously superfluous form we know it today. Obviously small batch craftsmanship of cutting edge technology adds to the price of the object and obviously price will come down as it is distributed to the masses with mass production and economies of scale. But what about the absurd tendency that the term luxury inevitably forces the psyche to go full retard and overdo the meal with edible gold flakes? As we transition to a resource based economy, shouldn't this term be scrapped altogether and be replaced with something with less baggage? Especially considering one definition of the term: 'habitual indulgence in or enjoyment of comforts and pleasures in addition to those necessary for a reasonable standard of well-being'"?

That is an excellent point. $800,000 crystal bathtub doesn't bring anything new to the table. Neither is it futuristic in form and function. It is definitely amazing to look at however and as eye candy brings immense amount of joy to the aesthetic part of the brain. Now, we often have unfortunate consequence of this gaudy superfluous obscenely expensive luxury creating strange trends such as silver plating of steel kitchen utensils in the 1850s-1950s period as well as formal attire of kings being shoved down everybody's throat as mass production and utilization of cheaper fabrics emulates it in large numbers.

This blog doesn't exactly advocate to be inspired to have a levitating, orgasmatronic bathtub, a 21st century bathtub that utilizes cheap 3D printed imitation crystal to mimic the $800,000 monstrosity in the link above with nanoinfused massaging coils. This blo..

"Hey that actually sounds kinda nea.."

This blog doesn't just state that 'hey it's ok to develop emotional attachments to tables, chairs, beds, and closets' if they combine the high tech elegance of an iPhone with the comfort and visually pleasing style of your favorite jacket that you had for 5 years and the design of which was based on the painfully and meticulously crafted similar line of jackets 100 years ago that used to cost 20 times more but that now even a middle class villager in Brazil can afford due to automation.

"That also doesn't sound bad at all but lets not add superfluous diamonds on the..."

This blog doesn't just advance the idea that 'hey, we don't have flying cars or floating houses yet and it's already 2012 so can't we at least have breakthroughs in how our living rooms look that are both aesthetic and technological improvement over some designs they had in the late 1960s?' but goes further. At Futuristic Luxury Furniture we believe that even in the face of massive global recession and crisis of capitalism that we're experiencing, our furniture should be psychologically inspirational and we should not be ashamed to gawk at it even if hippies don't like it or we think we're being slavish copycat monkeys in emulating rich man's styles and concoctions. We believe luxury can be reappropriated from the oligarchy and transformed into a healthy synthesis of style and function while encouraging us to move into the future and not feel bad about it. By 19th century standards, we all live in luxury today.

"That was a lot of words to defend starting your 10th blog to bring additional traffic under the cover of some futurist populism. Don't you think your time is better spent writing about political economy, breakthroughs in neuroscience, or new types of housing rather than exotic healthy food, trashy art, and borderline extinct black market mammals just to get some ad based liquor money?"

Hush, look at this.

A floating bed? Yeah just lay down and banish thy thoughts.