The Online Furniture Site I Can’t Stop Going Back To
I’ve been redoing the living room for what feels like the entire year. Most of it was easy — paint, rugs, the sofa we finally committed to after eighteen back-and-forths on velvet versus boucle.
But the smaller pieces, the ones that actually make a room feel like yours, those have been a nightmare. The same five sites keep showing me the same brass candleholder.
A friend in Paris finally sent me a link to The Oblist last month and I’ve barely closed the tab since.
It’s an online furniture site, but not in the West Elm sense. More like a directory of independent European designers and vintage dealers who all sell through the same platform.
So you’re scrolling through a young Portuguese ceramicist on one page and a 1970s travertine coffee table from a Brussels dealer on the next. Some of it is wildly expensive and probably not for me, but a surprising amount of it isn’t.
The things I keep adding to my wishlist:
Ceramic table lamps. I’ve wanted one of those imperfect, hand-thrown ones for ages and the selection here is the best I’ve seen outside of an actual gallery. There’s a deep oxblood one I’m trying very hard not to buy.
Vintage Art Deco vases. Small ones, the curved ones with the etched glass, that you can cluster on a console in groups of three. I’ve been doing this on the credenza in the entry. It costs almost nothing and changes the whole entryway.
Sculptural floor lamps. The kind that look more like a piece of art than a lamp. I have a blank corner near the reading chair that’s been begging for one for two years. I sent screenshots of three of them to my sister last week. She voted for the one shaped like a tall, asymmetric mushroom, which is also the one I would have picked.
The site itself is easy to use, which I appreciate more than I can say after spending three hours last week on a French antique dealer’s WordPress site from 2011.
Everything ships internationally. They post new pieces weekly, which means I now have a problem. I check the new arrivals on the same compulsive schedule as my email.
What I like most, I think, is that the curation has an actual point of view. It’s not algorithmic. Whoever is choosing what goes on the site clearly has taste, and that taste happens to overlap with mine: warm materials, sculptural forms, a little weird, a little imperfect. The opposite of the over-polished Restoration Hardware look that I can’t seem to escape on Instagram.
If you’re in the middle of a slow furniture project and tired of seeing the same fifteen pieces everywhere, The Oblist is genuinely worth the bookmark. I’ll report back when I finally commit to the oxblood lamp.
