It's back to the future for furniture, says ISABEL MORTON

RECENTLY, talking to a young woman at a viewing in Buckley’s Auction Rooms in Sandycove, Co Dublin, I had the thought that things are not so terribly different today, from how they were in the late 1970s, when I was first setting up home.

We struck-up conversation, as she was examining one sofa and I another, and she needed to borrow my industrial-sized tape measure.

“I never have any luck with sofas,” she said. “I don’t get to this auction every week, only when my work shifts allow and I’ve ended up as the under-bidder on at least four sofas recently. Every time I see one I like, it turns out that everyone else likes it as well. I’ve obviously got great taste!”

She went on to explain how she always stuck rigidly to her budget and never exceeded her pre-planned final bid. “I keep in mind auctioneers fees and delivery costs, so I never let myself go mad. “Anyway, bidding always makes me so nervous,” she giggled.

Listening to her, I was immediately transported back in time, to the days when I first started attending Buckley’s Thursday actions and was so worried about my lack of knowledge and experience that I turned up every week for more than four months before I mustered up the nerve to bid. And even then, my heart pounded so hard in my chest, that I was sure everyone in the auction room could hear it.

My first successful purchase was a framed charcoal portrait of a woman, for which I paid the outrageous sum of £36 (punts) plus fees. It took me hours to clean and repair the frame and I must have tried half a dozen different spots before I found the perfect home for her but I couldn’t have been more delighted if I had spent millions on a Monet.

I knew then I was hooked and it was confirmed when my mother sighed and told me that I had obviously inherited my grandmother’s passion for the auction room. Apparently, she was known for standing right beside the auctioneer’s podium and, maintaining a deadpan, inscrutable expression, made her bids known by tugging sharply but discreetly on the auctioneer’s coat tails.

Unable to resist a bargain, my grandmother bought three large sideboards one afternoon and forced her cousins into accepting two of them, as there were limits to how much furniture she could house.

When I recounted this story to my new young friend, she was horrified at the notion of such extravagance and proudly informed me that she was well on her way to furnishing her entire three-bed house for less than €5,000.

Her obvious delight at her own restraint only served to send me on a rant about the horrors of the boom years, when young people wouldn’t dream of moving in to their new apartment until it had been furnished with characterless, flat-pack furniture. She agreed, but admitted she would probably have done exactly the sameif she’d been in a position to buy property at the time.

“I was one of the lucky ones, I suppose. I travelled a bit after I left college and only came home a few years ago. So, although I got my house at a good price last January, I’m terrified in case I bought too early and prices will keep falling or I’ll lose my job. And, it’s just as well that I like the shabby look because all I can afford is cheap and cheerful second-hand stuff, as I haven’t a bean to do it up or furnish it properly.”

I was off down memory lane again, remembering the nasty white Formica kitchen table my husband brought home on the roof of his car and the disgusting old three-piece suite he bought in an old country junk shop, thinking it could be restored and recovered, until we discovered that it was home to a horde of mice.

She complained about her inherited PVC windows, woodchip wallpaper and shoddy chipboard wardrobes. In turn, I told her about how I had to tolerate impossible-to-wear-out, multicoloured patterned carpets for years, before I eventually threatened that if they didn’t go, I would.

She lost track of me entirely however, when I prattled on about aero-board insulation stuck to the ceilings, government grants for installing back-boilers and the appalling fashion for carpeting bathrooms, including running it up the side of the bath. (At 30, she is the same age as my own daughter and had no real memory of such vagaries.)

Later, considering the similarities between my early experiences of setting up home over three decades ago, and those being experienced today, I realised that there was one distinct difference.

Back in the 1970s, we had faith in the system and those who operated it, and we believed that if we worked hard and invested in safe, secure and respectable things such as insurance policies, bank shares and brick and mortar, we would be set up for life.

These days, young people aren’t quite so naive.

Isabel Morton is a property consultant