Sit on this

I've always had the greatest admiration for good salespeople and marketing bods, because it's something at which I'm utterly hopeless. It's a combination of my crapness with strangers, my principled loathing for shopping and consumerism of almost any kind and my utter inability to feign enthusiasm about anything whatsoever, including things I quite like. So I'll say at the outset that Sally, who works for the modern furniture retailer Regency Shop, does good sales. I'm not quite sure why a retailer specialising in modern design should be named after a period of the early 19th century, but hey, maybe that's why I'm not in marketing.

I'm also slightly befuddled as to why Sally contacted me and asked me to put a link to her Beau-Brummell-meets-the-Bauhaus emporium on my blog. To be fair, she does offer a hint:

"I realize that you have knowledge of barcelona :)... it'd be swell if you can place our barcelona chair link on your blog..."

Now I do have a cursory knowledge of Barcelona, having visited the place somewhere between once and three times; well, precisely between once and three times, as in twice, the last being more than eight years ago. It's jolly nice and I hope to go back, this time maybe for more than three days. But I don't know why this should give me any particular insight into a particular piece of furniture about which the only thing I know is that it was designed by Mies van der Rohe. And I'm not even sure how Sally knows about my limited knowledge of Barcelona; a trawl of my blog turns up one reference, in which I make a passing reference to the city in a post otherwise devoted to Cambodia.

But Sally's not done; in a final twist, she clarifies that the Barcelona chair that Regency Shop offers at the very reasonable price of $345 (plus shipping) isn't actually a Barcelona chair, presumably to avoid paying pesky royalties to the Mies van der Rohe estate:

"we call it the ibiza chair."

So Sally wants me to give a mention to this chair, because it's named after somewhere I haven't been. Or, more specifically, because I've been somewhere it's not named after. And you know what? I did!

Told you she was good.

PS: More conceptual Mies stuff here.