Furniture

Ruben Reyes is making himself at home in his new apartment on San Pedro Street in downtown L.A., setting out his phone and his CDs, planning to shop for food and cleaning supplies. After years on the streets — including San Pedro — as well as in shelters and in prison, and after just one night in the Charles Cobb Apartments, Reyes, 31, says he "feels like a king." "It's nice, it's gorgeous," he said, sitting on the bed — a bed designed, along with the nightstand and dresser, to fit the small apartment and to be durable, but also to be as appealing furniture designed for people with money to spend.

By the time the celebrated Milan furniture fair closed this week, the hottest style to emerge from the world's premiere showcase for home design wasn't supremely minimalist, elegantly baroque, technologically dazzling or glamorously chic. The look of 2010 was simply sober. The manufacturer representatives, designers, store buyers, journalists and design aficionados who attended the Salone Internazionale del Mobile saw fewer over-the-top spectacles conceived to land on magazine covers.

Philippe Starck strode up to the pedestal where the designer's new outdoor chairs and sofa were perched like art. He ran his fingers over the soft curves of the silky polypropylene, and as cameras flashed and onlookers nudged closer to hear his verdict on the display, Starck didn't say much of anything. Instead, he peered into an armrest, where gloomy black suddenly gave way to bright orange, and he smiled. A light at the end of the tunnel. Hope is the prevailing sentiment here at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, better known as the Milan furniture fair, where the world's greats in home décor gathered this week to premiere their 2010 collections.

After losing staff ace John Lackey to free agency over the winter, the Angels need a healthy Ervin Santana to step up this season. So no one was laughing when the former All-Star banged his valuable right elbow on a piece of furniture a few days ago. "Some people call it the funny bone," pitching coach Mike Butcher said. "It's just not that funny." So Santana, who made two trips to the disabled list because of elbow and forearm problems last year, was scratched from his scheduled start Tuesday and won't pitch again until Sunday.

Gina Quatrine declared that her furniture factory was a "true old-fashioned European workshop" -- which seemed a bit incongruous, given that we were standing on a concrete shop floor in an industrial neighborhood of Rancho Dominguez. Yet there was no contradicting her. All around us, Quatrine Custom Furniture's artisans were working with their hands, here planing the alder frame of a sofa soon to be upholstered with genuine cotton batting, there stitching a slipcover from a bolt of embroidered fabric, all in the name of creating a piece that will be sturdy and serviceable long after your mass-produced living room set has been placed out on the curb.

It can be a bit delicate to ask a furniture shopper: "Oh, sir, um, maybe, ah, you'd like to see something a bit, hmmm, sturdier?" We are, as a people, as a sitting-in-chairs public, big. Bigger than we ought to be, health authorities frequently tell us. And bigger than many standard chairs of years past were made to hold comfortably. So the scale of furniture has increased over the last decade — to suit both the size of homes and the size of their occupants, said Max Shangle, professor and chairman of the furniture design department at Kendall College of Art and Design in Michigan.

Kang Ki-kab sighs. Life in Seoul, away from his family and the homestead he calls the Farm That Loves Soil, has proved a lonely existence for South Korea's unlikeliest politician. He misses the simple chores, like milking his 90 cows and harvesting his sweet Korean plums. He sits in his legislative office, hands clasped calmly on his lap, a monk-like anachronism with a wispy white beard and a flowing cream-colored robe tied with a large bow. "Our ancestors wore these, why can't I?"

The rolling kitchen cart called the Butcher is actually an old television stand set on casters, topped with butcher block and decorated with the silhouettes of 22 knives painstakingly stenciled across the front and side of the cabinet. It's just one of the clever pieces by Purpose Restoration, a four-person workshop that transforms unloved old furniture into new, one-of-a-kind functional pieces. The company was founded a year ago by Jason Fox, 35, who says he left a job overseeing the construction of stores for fashion retailer BCBG "to do something creative" with his hands.

Lawmakers admonished state administrators Wednesday for expenditures such as furnishings costing up to $7,000 per employee, an airplane for Caltrans inspectors valued at nearly $1 million, a $429,000 boat and 1,300 cars, motorcycles and trucks costing $34 million. "I find these expenditures to be an insult and very disrespectful to every furloughed state employee, to every taxpayer who has been working very hard to make ends meet, who is driving an old car on its last legs when this state chooses not to do the same," said Assemblywoman Audra Strickland (R-Thousand Oaks)

Even as the state grappled with a budget crisis last year, bureaucrats spent nearly $45 million on new vehicles, almost $30 million on new furniture and more than $2 million on off-site meetings and conferences, a legislative panel has found. The expenditures were outlined in a report released Monday by the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review, which plans to call on state agency managers to explain their spending at a hearing Wednesday. "These expenses came despite an executive order from the governor last year for each state agency to cut costs and eliminate vehicle purchases unless they were for emergency purposes," said Mark Martin, a consultant for the committee.