Sofas And Sensibility

It is a truth universally acknowledged, or so wrote Jane Austen, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Maybe so, maybe no, but these days our man (or woman) will also want some nifty home furnishings. In this matter, the modern equivalent of Austen's status strivers may ply some truths not found in her work. For starters: that nothing goes with a Basic Sectional Sofa with Cranberry Twill Slipcovers quite like a Franklin Console. Fortunately, for such domestic doctrine, we have Pottery Barn, where these very items have been milled to a degree of taste and accessibility unknown to the furniture stores of 1813. Yet as the Barn spreads its taupe authority to 116 stores, and 8 million catalogs monthly, other questions arise. To wit: what to do when your dinner host displays the same unique-looking Mica Torchiere you just bought? As the acronymic bracelets ask, What Would Jane Do?

To a small but well-heeled cadre of furniscenti, there is but one answer: a Barn backlash. House & Garden magazine recently decried what it called Retail Fatigue Syndrome, or RFS, a reaction to the tastefully bland uniformity of stores like Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel and Ikea. "If Banana Republic is where you go to buy safe, hip clothes for work," says editor Dominique Browning, "then Pottery Barn is where you can get safe, hip stuff for your home." This, one might think, is a good thing, at least when weighed against the Mediterranean dinette sets of yore. But be not fooled. As Marco Pasanella, author of the new guidebook "Living in Style Without Losing Your Mind," contends, the road to domestic hell is paved with good design intentions. "The fact that everyone has good taste," he says, "now means no one has good taste."

Recently, even the sitcom "Friends" turned its social laser on the Pottery Barn Question, in an episode in which the Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer characters buy the same faux antique apothecary table. Passing by a Pottery Barn window, friend Lisa Kudrow rails, "This stuff is everything that is wrong with the world."

Pottery Barn president Gary Friedman modestly attributes the backlash to the company's success. "It's like Starbucks and The Gap," he says. "When you start to be ubiquitous, people come after you." Next summer the company launches Elm Street, an Old Navy-style chain of discount stores that will make ready-made good taste even cheaper, more mass. The fracas may seem a lot of huffing about some affordable, decent-looking furniture. "There is a strong degree of elitism in the backlash," says Susan Yelavich of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, who sees the Pottery Barn phenomenon as a natural outgrowth of a more mobile society, which no longer organizes its rooms around family heirlooms. This mobility, she contends, calls for disposability--a niche Pottery Barn fills admirably. Yelavich traces the Barn's ideological roots to the early 20th-century Bauhaus movement, which sought to provide uniform, stylin' shelter to the masses.

In "From Bauhaus to Our House," Tom Wolfe noted that this movement ran aground in America, where the ungrateful masses wanted lawn jockeys and shag carpets, much to the disappointment of their snooty benefactors. Now the masses are awash in good taste, even if not necessarily their own. The design elite finally has the public it sought. The battle begins anew.