Dressed for the guests

The furniture showrooms are busy in January, and they are busy in one corner: the long sofas, the extra dining chairs, the curtains, the matching glasses, the paint.

With Ramadan expected around the middle of February, a house has about six weeks.

Ready for what is the part the plan misses. For a month the household hosts, most nights, and is hosted in return. Relatives, neighbours, the in-laws, the cousins who come once a year: all of them will sit in the room kept for guests, eat off the plates, and see the kitchen when a tray is carried out of it. Thirty evenings of visitors is the most thorough inspection a home gets all year.

So the sofa is bought for the evening the in-laws sit on it, not for the family's own Tuesday. The dinner service is chosen for the table it will be seen on. The wall gets painted because a mark on it will be looked at by forty people who were not in the house last year. The oven is replaced now because cooking for fourteen cannot be improvised on the second night.

Meanwhile the category writes its January copy about comfort. Softer, warmer, a home to unwind in, a little time for yourself. That line was written for a buyer sitting alone in a quiet room, and the buyer in the showroom is not alone in any room they are picturing. Nobody spends six weeks and the price of a sofa on getting a house ready to relax in.

Comfort is what the brand is selling. Standing is what the customer came in for, and standing has a delivery date. In the house before the first evening, or it was money spent on next year.