The gold sideboard caused a proper argument the day it arrived, before it had even been unwrapped properly. Someone had ordered it off the back of one photo, no discussion, no group chat vote, just turned up on a Tuesday looking like it belonged in a hotel lobby nobody could afford. The reaction in the room was somewhere between horror and betrayal. Gold. On purpose. In a house that had spent two years insisting on oak and “natural tones” like we were running a Scandinavian retreat rather than a dining room with a wine stain shaped like Australia under the rug.
Nobody was excited about it, is the honest version.
It sat there being ornamental and smug for about a week while half the group refused to eat dinner near it on principle.
Then it just started working, the way things you resent occasionally do. The drawers hold everything that isn’t cutlery, which turns out to be most things, chargers, birthday candles, a single roller skate nobody claims. The top has survived four dinner parties, one very confident red wine gesture, and a candle left burning long enough to leave a faint ring that we now call “the incident” and refuse to explain further.
The legs are the actual sticking point, still, months later. They’re slim and brass and lovely to look at, and also apparently designed by someone who has never sat a full sized dining chair anywhere near them. Two of our chairs slide in fine. The third catches on the crossbar every single time, so whoever draws that seat spends the whole meal at a slight diagonal like they’re perpetually about to leave.
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We have discussed swapping that chair out. We have not done it. It’s been eight months.
The gold itself divides us more than anything else in the room. One argument holds that it catches the evening light beautifully and makes the whole space look intentional rather than accidental. The other side maintains it looks like a wedding venue prop that escaped, and that we are all pretending otherwise because returning it felt like too much effort three weeks in. Both of these things are probably true at once, which is annoying.
What’s changed is that nobody suggests getting rid of it anymore, not even the people who called it “a lot” to its face on day one. It’s just there now, holding the good glasses and absorbing knee bruises and looking, against every prediction we made about ourselves, exactly right.
We still haven’t sorted the third chair. We’re not sure we’re going to.
