this bantam's come home to roost or, thanks, craigslist

The past few days, after having been to Crate & Barrel over the weekend, we’ve been thinking again about the lack of furniture in the house. At Crate & Barrel we were quite taken by the Petrie sofa (as in Rob and Laura), with its tufting and retro 1960s look. Sitting on it, we found it really quite comfortable.

Some Internet research, though, determined that it was the sofa used in the recent Jennifer Aniston/Vince Vaughn movie The Break Up and is, in fact, the sofa seen in the promotional shot of the two of them sitting sullenly at opposite ends, looking straight ahead, she with her arms crossed, he with his hands in his lap. And I discovered that I wasn’t very fond of the sofa when people were sitting on it; it looked awkwardly bowed, with the cushions parting unevenly in the middle. So we went searching online for alternatives, at Room and Board and Design Within Reach (DWR), among others. The sofa that most caught our eye was DWR’s Bantam, roughly the same price and with the same midcentury aesthetic—including the same wonderful tapered wood legs—but with a much cleaner look, featuring an uninterrupted back, solitary row of buttons, and single long seat cushion.

Thursday night the DWR Studio Potrero in San Francisco is hosting an Eames film festival, and we had planned to go and to head over early to see the sofa beforehand (it turns out now that the festival is full—despite the email they sent me earlier this week mentioning nothing about needing to rsvp; I only discovered that we can no longer attend when I went again just now to get the link. Grrr.).

Today, however, I saw a posting on Apartment Therapy noting a Craigslist ad for the Bantam, at a little more than half off the retail price. The post was several days old already, so I figured the sofa had been snatched up, but I sent an email anyway. And it’s ours. Jeff took care of renting a cargo van from Budget, we each withdrew half the amount from our banks, and we drove down after work to pick up the sofa from a hottie in Menlo Park (a recent UCLA graduate who has just scored his first post-college job with an Internet company in SOMA). Our little olive Bantam is now happily ensconced in our living room, across from the fireplace and amidst the packing boxes.

This particular sofa was a floor model, though new, and as such it does have a few (very minor) scuffs; on the whole, though, its quite a nice piece of furniture, and it really fits our style and the period of the house. And, for $800 instead of $1,400, I’m very happy with it.