Faking the Collected Look

A few months back a friend of mine found a beautiful (and huge) old craved door at a flea market that she is having made into a dining table.

To go with the table she decided she wanted a mixed match set of old farm house chairs, so we hit the thrift shops, the flea markets, the consignment shops, the antique shops and. . . well, came up empty handed. Turns out south Florida isn't crawling with vintage farm chairs (who would've guessed) and with the holidays looming before us it was time to try a different approach. . . Faking it. . .

So instead of searching for old farm house chairs, we starting looking for new chairs with that old farm house style.

We came up with two pretty affordable options:

Ikea -

KAUSTBY, INGOLF (with armrests), BALSER, IVAR
STEFAN, LANNI, BERTIL, INGOLF

Overstock.com -

Paloma, Windsor
Country Cottage, Mackenzie Casual Countryside

Both sets have pros and cons. With the Ikea set you can have 8 different chairs, but they aren't a "heavy" as you would like a farm house chair to be (not sure how to put that any better). With Overstock you end up with pairs of mixed matched chairs, but they nice a chunky and feel more like the real thing.

Which direction did my friend decide to go? Well, that will have to wait for another day, unfortunately the dining table has hit some snags and it now looks like the holiday dinner she is aiming for will be Easter.