Utility Furniture

Furniture, second largest U.S. industry in the consumer durable goods field, has finally been driven by material and labor shortages from the state of pinch into near chaos. The bad news:

> U.S. furniture production this year will drop about 20% below 1942 output.

> Last November, WPB banned metal springs for use in living-room furniture and beds. Goose and duck feathers were next to go. In March, new furniture patterns were prohibited. The use of metal joinings is limited. Then, last month, existing furniture patterns were ordered cut two-thirds. Wood was scarce as metal.

> Up bounced a flourishing black market. Renovators were paying junkmen $6.50 for used coil springs, were reselling them to retailers for $15.

> Grand Rapids, Mich., traditional home of U.S. furniture, had been steadily converting to plane parts and plywood gliders. Fifteen Grand Rapids furniture manufacturers (75% of Grand Rapids' production facilities) consolidated as Grand Rapids Industries, got the wooden parts contracts, recently bought up plane patent rights from General Aircraft Corp.

U.S. citizens were able to find few pieces of ornamental, cushiony, or heavily upholstered furniture in retail stores. The remaining dealers fumed, shrugged. Manufacturers, not yet Government-restricted on quantity (provided they could find the necessary materials and labor) looked with interest at Britain's six months' experience with standardized furniture. For, as has happened many a time in this war, the British experience may well prove to be the general pattern for the U.S.

Made for Utility. Between August 1940 and November 1942 the Nazi blitz demolished 250,000 British homes, damaged two and a half million more. The national need for cheap, durable furniture was great.

Last summer, Hugh Dalton, president of the Board of Trade, called in pioneer industrial art designer Charles Tennyson, grandson of the Poet Laureate, appointed him chairman of an advisory committee. The committee included architects, social workers, furniture manufacturers, designers, and one working-class housewife.

Within six months 1,200 struggling firms had been reduced to 132 by means of a licensing system. Many of the firms left out in the cold converted to furniture repair, or became warehouses. The remainder are subsidized by a fund into which the functioning manufacturers pay 75% of the difference between their costs plus a profit allowance (6%) and the maximum fixed manufacturing price. (The other 25% is a bonus for efficiency.)

Last January, the Tennyson committee's first skeleton-simple, material-&-labor-saving Utility Furniture was on sale: 45 designs of 17 essential pieces. Wood was used only for legs, struts and supports. Metal was allowed only for bedsprings. All flat surfaces were made of a compressed wood fiber 1/8 inch thick called hardboard.

The public wanted to buy, but money alone would not buy Utility Furniture. Ration point coupons were issued only to: 1) those whose furniture was blitzed after Jan. 1, 1941. 2) mothers expecting a first child; 3) mothers whose children had outgrown beds; 4) engaged couples.

Utility Furniture cost 1/3 than comparable prewar products. Sixty coupons--the maximum--are about enough to take the emptiness out of a small, three-room apartment. All the furniture is extraordinarily plain-looking, angular, simple, functional. After six months of Utility Furniture the British thought Tennyson's greying grandson a practical and knowing fellow. Some even hoped his designs would be continued after the war.

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