What I learned about furniture and Portugal
By Susan M. Andrews, Fabric editor -- Furniture Today, March 10, 2002
When the boss realized he couldn't attend the Export Home market, I was the lucky winner of three days in Porto, Portugal, a country I'd never visited before.
I knew puh-lenty about Portugal, of course. I knew it was that little country just left of Spain on the map and that most speakers of the language live in Brazil. I knew it had some relationship to that story about Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of America in 1492. In 25 words or less, I might have said Portugal was a mini-Spain, a little bonus Latin country that didn't touch the Mediterranean. Wrong as usual, Miss Know-It-All!
Here's a bit of what I learned:
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The northern area of the country around the city of Porto is the source of some of the most beautifully crafted classic English and French furniture in the world, and Portugal is getting no credit, at least in this country, for the skill of its craftsmen who carve the graceful ornamentation and cut the tiny, delicate marquetry bits for gorgeous inlaid work.
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The Portuguese talent for classic furniture became evident when the British came here (the only port wine region on the planet) to get into the port wine business in the 18th century. Bringing along their furniture from home would have cost a fortune, and the British quickly learned the local craftsmen could produce it for them, and with great skill.
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The furniture industry in Portugal is so different from ours in the United States that it's almost disorienting. In Portugal there are thousands of furniture manufacturing companies. Most are tiny, family-owned companies with just two or three employees. Statistics published last month in Portugal indicate the manufacturing of furniture and mattresses involves 7,938 companies that employ 60,270 people. That works out to less than eight people per company.
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Export is crucial to the Portuguese furniture industry. As you can imagine, those thousands of producers can make far more furniture than is needed in a country of just 10 million souls. They export mostly to their European neighbors, but knowing the American consumer rules, they really, really want to sell to us.
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It's not just classic furniture they do well in Portugal. There's simple, rustic furniture used in the countryside. There's cool, blonde Scandinavian contemporary. There's modern furniture incorporating metal or the beautiful marble and granite for which Portugal is also rightly famous.
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Although a centuries-old trade center where cultures met without clashing, Portugal is coming late to the modern global marketplace. About 40 years of repression under Antonio Salazar's dictatorial rule kept it shut off from the rest of the world until the revolution in 1974.
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A lot of fine hands-on furniture skill is concentrated here, and the brightest among us will find mutually beneficial ways to exploit it.
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Port, which can be made only from grapes grown along the River Douro, the Golden River, is a good thing.
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