In the mid-'90s ABC Carpet & Home on Broadway had the best window displays in the world. They were dioramas far more fanciful and odder than anything dreamed up for the Fifth Avenue Christmas displays, giving a glimpse of scenes largely irrelevant to everyday decorating but strangely enchanting nonetheless. The windows are not nearly as interesting now, but my jaunt into the first floor yesterday gave me a much-needed jolt of sheer delight.
I don't normally enjoy shopping all that much, unless it's for objects. Good home stores are like museums to me: full of exquisite loveliness that feeds my soul. It used to torture me that I couldn't take it all home, but I've discovered that I enjoy it just as much, if not more, in its original setting. For one thing, I'm just as happy that I don't have to dust it. For another, half the fun is the context the object is in. Done right, such things create the suggestion of microcosms. This is what makes ABC such a marvelous place to browse, especially the first floor, which is always reinventing itself. And how could you not love a store whose sales slogan is taken from Rumi: "Walk out like someone born into color. Do it now."
Just now, the outside entrance sports a dry fountain and a couple of tree stumps, all of it amidst scattered moss, signaling entry into a dilapidated and forgotten woodland grotto. Inside, ABC has transformed itself, or at least the first floor, into an arts and crafts emporium, with odd bits of folk art mostly from the far east. To merely list what's on display wouldn't do it justice. The objects themselves can be found elsewhere, but in much less interesting surroundings. One retailers' site remarked that one of the charms of ABC is that half the things in it don't look like they're on sale. Instead, it looks rather like you've stumbled into an eccentric aunt's attic, or Arthur Conan Doyle's idea of Faeryland.
The first floor is a candystore for the eyes, riotous with the colors of silk pillows, Chinese jackets, rugs woven in fierce patterns, jacquard tapestries and cashmere throws. Except for a few scattered jewelry counters—lovely antiques themselves—it's mostly soft piles on the floor and stacks of mouth-blown glasses and wheel-fashioned crockery on antique tables, filled with Tibetan charms and bracelets; open cabinets full of Buddhas and statues of Ganesh and Shiva, looking more like altars than displays; hanging gardens of chandeliers, forests of standing candelabra and lamps. On one visit, I was rewarded with the site of an enormous red lacquer Chinese wedding bed (the kind that are little enclosed rooms unto themselves) lavished with antique pillows and bedding. Another time they'd built a yurt in the middle of the floor, stacked with rugs and strewn, again, with antique silk pillows and brass teapots.
Each little display is a vignette of sorts, a keyhole view of some other world that's just slightly off-kilter. Just inside the door this time was a monochromatic altar labeled "Compassion" filled with various pale and golden Buddhas and wooden offering bowls hand carved from the boles of trees. On another table were tall antique pharmacy jars filled with birds nests, dried moss, painted mushrooms and other forest detritus, along with artificial butterfly garlands and bell-jar encased "fairy chairs"—an amateur naturalist's collection rescued from some Victorian attic. Another low table held clear bottles of various shapes and sizes, sealed with white candle wax, labeled by hand in a spidery script, and containing everything from pixie dust to an impossibly tiny penguin diorama: both medicine and whimsy. Or whimsy as medicine.
While wandering around, I was imagining what it might be like to be locked in the store overnight. Far less creepy than being locked in the cold, ascetic corridors of the Met, I suspect. Where the Met is a cathedral whose objects are holy relics, ABC is a palace that uses its treasures. The store is a sensualist's delight, full of color and texture and cozy nooks and crannies where one could happily lose oneself for hours. There's not only a little tapas cafe, a bakery, and the back entrance to Lucy's Latin Kitchen, but a high-end chocolatier. Pilfer a bit of food (don't forget the chocolate!), bask in the soft overnight illumination, curl up in a nest of pillows, flip on one of the Harvey plasma TVs (wonder if they have cable?)—it would be a pleasant imprisonment, at least for the evening.
This is what I really love about ABC's first floor: it sparks my imagination in ways that other stores never have. It's less shopping than exploration, in the right frame of mind. Of course, it's also a great place to buy unusual presents too, whether for friends, or yourself. I think even Rumi would approve.
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