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February 17, 2006 > Arts & Entertainment > French furniture cures Japanese film blues

French furniture cures Japanese film blues

By Julia Bursten | Thresher Editorial Staff

Not all ideas are good ones. Pruning the hedges in the quad, for example: bad idea. But, while the Thresher did print an editorial about the unsightly shrubbery, no one was asked to write about that particular bad idea.

On the other hand, I received an e-mail last week asking me to write about The Grudge director Takashi Shimizu’s indie side project Marebito, released last Friday at the Angelika. This psychological thriller was a very, very bad idea.

I finished the hurriedly-produced, low-budget disappointment and attempted to start a review. To no avail. Really, some movies simply are not worth a 600-word critique — not even a scathing one. I started sometime around 8 p.m., and by 10 had no more than two paragraphs saying, effectively, “Don’t go see this.”

Writer’s block happens. Sometimes the subject is to blame, sometimes the writer. Sometimes stress gets to all of us and we have to blow off steam before we can get a story out. The good thing is that there are remedies, and mine is furniture shopping.

Enter Ligne Roset at 5600 Kirby Dr. I walked into the urbane, gallery-like showroom Monday afternoon in a foul disposition. The sleek and geometric bed I fell into upon arrival was deceptively cozy — I never expected such high-fashion bed-gear to be anything better than atrociously uncomfortable.

After these first five blissful minutes inside Ligne Roset, Bruce Wolfe, the trilingual Midwesterner-turned-New-York-City-fur-salesman-turned-furniture-guru on duty, managed to wrest me from designer Peter Maly’s signature bed. I wandered around the electric-bright upholstery in the store, wondering whom I could thank for finding a way to tastefully bring back the avocadoes and mustards of 1970s design.

The shag-era influence did not stop at color alone. My favorite piece in the place was a European take on the ultimate, upscale bean-bag. Togo, a line of chairs, ottomans and sectionals originally released in 1973, is as humorously inviting on first glance as it is relaxing during a first lounging session. I felt the stress of my writer’s block beginning to melt into this monstrously mushy, magnificent seat.

As Bruce toured me through more of the showroom, he explained Ligne Roset’s philosophy of “edited design.” Pieces draw inspiration not only from the shag-a-delic 1970s, but also from Germany’s Bauhaus faction of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as numerous other influential movements in contemporary architectural and interior design.

The more formal furniture in the showroom, especially the dining tables, revealed another of the high-end furnishings’ fun and boutique-y bonuses. With the tables, the company’s French heritage — the Ligne has been family-owned since its inception — surrenders conspicuously to sleekly engineered, German-influenced functional kinetics. Coffee tables become laptop desks with a few ounces of pressure and then change dimensions entirely to accommodate a six-person poker game.

Combined with whimsically crafted dining chairs, these paranormal tables drove me to utter distraction and chased away any remaining misgivings about my Marebito-based lack of inspiration.

I left the Ligne wishing for a furniture fairy godmother, dragging with me a bulky, dog-eared catalog and a good idea. And while actually owning a Togo chair may be little more than a pipe dream for the time being, at least now I have somewhere to go in Houston the next time I get writer’s block.

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