Habitat

Tyrone and Ravi, the two senior managers at Habitat, have big smiles in the accompanying photo, and well they should. According to them, over the last fiscal year (it ends in March here) we have purchased more furniture than any other customer (and this is one of the best known furniture stores in the city)! While others may have spent more money, the close to ten pieces (not including the eight dining chairs) that we bought have done wonders for clearing their inventory. As you might imagine we’ve become quite close to these folks and learned early on that the name of the game at Habitat is to bargain, and bargain hard. Whatever the price tag says (yes, they actually put price tags on the items) you can start the negotiations at 40% of that price and work your way up from there. Of course, there is a greater chance of getting your price if you purchase more things, and most of our purchases have been of multiple items. The items at Habitat seem to match the tastes of Indiamama quite well and Tyrone has a nice way (obviously very convincing) of explaining the history of various pieces. Most of the things that we have bought from Habitat are old pieces where the wood has been ‘reclaimed’ from homes that were demolished. This wood, an Indian teak called “shesham”, grows in higher elevations of the Himalaya and many of our pieces are made from original pieces that used Nepali trees. As for the sustainability of the tree harvesting, this I cannot say for sure, but at least when you Google “shesham clear cut” or “shesham deforestation” you don’t read about how folks are being displaced or massive erosion problems. And, hey, if Google doesn’t catch it, it doesn’t exist. Right?

Kaia’s favorite part of being at Habitat is their large, air conditioned, carpet room. Generally we visit Habitat on a day where we’re hitting other places and this means a lot of time in the car and stores where there are a lot of breakables or other stuff that he shouldn’t be getting into (although the patience of Indian folks doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable having a small child while shopping). The carpet room at Habitat, however, is a place where he can run around on thousand dollar rugs (!) and climb on the rolled up carpets. For as much as we enjoy being able to have him run around, it seems like the staff at Habitat are equally entertained by his antics.

As much as any place in Chennai, we’ll remember Habitat simply due to the fact that we have so many pieces of furniture to remind us. When we moved here, we were only ‘allowed’ (read: our shipping allowance covered) to take a few boxes, so basically we had to fully furnish our place with local things. Since there is little to no resale market, we made the decision to spend a bit more money and purchase very nice things that we would keep and ship back. Fortunately for us, the shipping policy changed while we’ve been here, so all of the things that we have purchased here will be covered. Now the next questions are: finding a place in the US that will fit all of our new things and what to do with all of our things in storage that just don’t really hold their salt when compared to the antiques we’re coming home with…