I’m going to assume, if you’re reading this, that you have not slept for so much as a minute since I posted about my search for a credenza. Would she find one? I know, there has been nothing else to think about. Not globally, not in any of your lives personally. I know this much.
First I did a bit of a credenza hunt. This went poorly. I thought, I’ll go to some furniture stores, but then remembered there aren’t any. There is IKEA. There are the mid-range stores that sell high-end versions of IKEA. There are (per the internet) used furniture stores where for the low low price of $500,000, a credenza by a very esteemed Danish designer whom I have definitely heard of and definitely want to go to Canadian furniture-based debtors prison to own. None of this seemed right.
My wandering-around time being limited, I had to figure out where I could see, in person, some credenzas. (Credenzae?) I came up with the same foolish idea as I had when we were looking for a kitchen table (the one we wound up getting at IKEA): the Junction. Per Google Maps it is teeming with furniture stores. Per being there, not really. There is one good one, albeit with limited selection of this sort of thing, where I made friends with a credenza that was over budget and the wrong dimensions. Other stores I thought had used furniture turned out to sell hideous new furniture or (mediocre; yeah I glanced) vintage clothes. One place was like, you could try to repurpose this trunk as a sideboard! And I’m sure someone could do that.
All of this took maaaybe 45 minutes (not counting bus rides) and was worthwhile if only in allowing me to see that some of what I’d seen online and found intriguing was in fact extremely short—even for my short self— and maybe useful as a TV stand but not as a surface for putting keys down.
A vintage clothing store near my family doctor sells credenzas, I could see, I went in, ascertained that these don’t fit in the space and are too expensive, and had, I guess, a further data point.
Mostly I pored over Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji, which is like Canadian Craigslist. (Actual Craigslist had nothing.) Someone was selling the perfect credenza at a price high enough to think it’s not a joke but low enough that it seemed a bit too good to be true and I arranged to go on some multi-leg public-transit adventure to go look at and maybe get it. The guy selling it said I should confirm morning-of, and I did, and it had sold to someone else the previous night. Then I thought he had reposted the same one for a higher price but it turns out he is a credenza salesman and had posted a similar-looking one with the same styling. Whatever.
The near-miss was a let-down but also empowering in that it reminded me that there is this thing called you hire someone with a van to deliver your furniture. This isn’t super helpful when it comes to going and looking at furniture scattered all over the city (why nothing like Housing Works, Toronto, why?? why no East 23rd Street?), but it does mean that the choice isn’t between the credenzas being sold within a block of where I live and IKEA (which we also do by delivery because you cannot put even a flat-box dresser on a streetcar).
How did the credenza happen, then? I think it was the good ol’ Google Maps thing, where I looked for used furniture stores in places I could plausibly get to and found one with decent ratings (whatever that means) and a website that showed what it is they sell (not a given!). And there it was: a credenza the right dimensions, at a price point (IKEA x 2, basically) suggestive of actual decent used furniture if not from the Häagen-Dazs-brand producers of midcentury modern desirability.
What is it? I did some reverse-image searching and it seems like it is 1960s-ish and from Quebec. Maybe it is something called Victoriaville. Maybe it is last season’s IKEA, would I know?
What it definitely is is Golden Girls-century Not-so-Modern. We were watching this and I turned to my husband and pointed to their cabinets and was like, that is the credenza I ordered.
I say “ordered” because even though it is a feasible transit trip from Roncesvalles to Leslieville, I didn’t have time, and also didn’t entirely see the point, given that I now knew what I was looking for and could discuss various concerns (such as: how do the side doors open?) with someone in the store, over the phone. If I turned this into a bigger research project, I would not only neglect the paid work that makes credenzas like this possible, but also would risk someone else noticing the $600 credenza in a world of $1200 or $5000 credenzas (all prices in CAD, as if anyone could possibly possibly care) and act before someone else did.
Yes, I did a DoorDash discourse but instead of having a $30 sandwich delivered, it was a piece of furniture.
Is it good? It is so good. When time permits—and it cannot be time when kids are asleep—I will actually fill it with the stuff that needs to go in it, thereby solving all our organization issues, thereby becoming the sort of interiors influencer who does credenza spon-con and is saved the bother of all this.
I will expect regular state-of-the-credenza updates going forward, please.
Yeah, the Italian plural is credenze, the English plural is credenzas, and you can use either! (Once the word has been lent it uses English plurals and not, say, Latin plurals, as I woefully discovered decades ago. So it's octopuses & viruses and not octopi & virii, which is wrong and communist and ungodly, and also continues to annoy me, but there it is.)
It's a very nice piece made from real wood, and it very much resembles (with the curved wood handles) some furniture I inherited from 1958. So I would put the piece in the 1955-65 range.
elm
nicely done phoebe