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There's a furniture store on Antique Row 28th Lane
off SW 27th Avenue that is attracting a lot of interest from South
Florida designers and exotic furniture dealers.
Zen manager Isabella Patty poses with one of the Indonesian artifacts
in her store
It's called Zen Antique Furniture, but don't be fooled
by the name. The furniture, while antique for the most part, is from
Indonesia.
"The actual name is Zen Antique Furniture and a
lot of people come in here looking for American antiques," said
store manager Isabella Patty. "We really have antiques from
Indonesia, exotic furnishings. But, when people think antiques, they
usually think American antiques. So, the name is really misleading and
we prefer the name Zen Exotic Furnishings."
The furniture in the 10,000-square-foot showroom is
handcrafted, one-of-a-kind merchandise and it's really quite tasteful
and beautiful. But, be prepared to max out your Visa and Master Card,
this stuff isn't cheap. Prices range from $200 for a fairly normal
looking chair to $8,500 for a massive square coffee table carved from
the trunk of a tree.
"That's the Capini table," said Patty.
"Capini is a type of wood found in Indonesia. That table is over
400 years old and it's made from one solid slab of wood. Those are
natural highlights in the wood -- that's a very hard thing to find --
and you never really see trees that size."
Patty says the company has more than 1,000 furniture
pieces in its inventory, with 300 items in the store; the others
warehoused and pulled out for display as needed.
"The pieces we have in the showroom are
antiques," she said. "Some are 400 years old, some are from
the 1800s. We have a lot of solid wood, sculpted pieces benches,
armoires, very beautiful pieces. We have many armoires, but they're
all different because they are individually made. It's not a
reproduction of the same piece a thousand times over. They're all a
different type of wood, different size, different cabinets, different
doors."
Some of the furniture on display in the Zen showroom
is huge, much to big for the average three- or four-bedroom South
Florida home. Patty concedes that those pieces are destined for
another niche.
"Much of our furniture, because of its size, is
better suited for a large home, or a hotel or office lobby," she
said.
Patty said the owner of the store who declined to
be interviewed for this story and wants to remain anonymous -- started
out looking for Indonesian furnishings and artifacts for his home.
"In the process, he thought that other people
would like the things that he was finding," Patty explained,
"so, he began buying more merchandise to send back to the states.
Almost everything that he buys has a story behind it."
A stroll around the sprawling showroom reveals a
collection of the unusual, the exotic, the strange and the offbeat.
There are stone artifacts for outdoor gardens, including a huge head
of an Indonesian princess carved from lava rock. There is a
hand-polished, sculpted bench that strangely resembles a sperm whale;
a large wooden bowl carved from the root of a tree root sits on coffee
table with a price tag of $500; there is a pair of beautiful opium
beds for $5,900 apiece; a chair carved in one piece from the trunk of
a tree for $3,000; a lovely round dining table with five chairs for
$2,800; a half-dozen armoires ranging from $1,000 to $3,000; and a
unique CD rack topped with a hand-carved wooden head, certain to cause
conversation in anybody's home.
Even with the relatively high-dollar price tags, Patty
says business is great. "It's going really good," she
said. "We just had our one-year anniversary party."
For more information, please call 305-860-8100.
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