How this third-gen custom furniture maker pulled his family business, Danovel, out of a 10-year rut

Few mod cons can capture the zeitgeist rather like a sofa; they are omnipresent enough to obscure a home theater while remaining special as a sign of changing trends.

Consider it a central feature of popular culture: Friends characters are continuously coiled around chintzy, dimpled orange mohair settee-like vines, cheerfully bandaging about their first-world grouses over obscene coffee mugs. It’s likewise employed as a literary system. Dissolute celebrity Daisy Buchanan and her friend are depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as being” as if upon an tied balloon,” a sign of their joyful but finally vacuous existence.

For Marcus Wong, a third-generation sofa expert, it is n’t really that profound. While his mother’s customized furniture company, Danovel, may specialize in comfortable upholstery that accommodates all kinds of bacchanalian whims, he views the couch as a repository of memories rather than a status symbol. A four-seater sectional couch that has been re-upholstered numerous times over the course of three decades and is intimately tied to his early life has been spewed in their living room.

Wong recalled that this is where I faked sleeping but that my parents could take me to bed and where we did our research as children. His heritage may not be the most luxurious, but to him, ancient is gold. ” A properly- made piece of furniture is one that you can move on to generations, not everything is made to be thrown absent”, asserted the 42- year- older.

CHASING THE SINGAPORE Vision

Longevity is a running concept in our talk, which traced Danovel’s history as a realisation of the’ Nanyang desire’. In order to do financial opportunities outside of China’s stormy Cultural Revolution, immigrants like experienced laborer Koh Khee Khim gathered on a wing and a meditation in Singapore in the 1960s to seek economic opportunities. A Shantou local, Wong’s paternal grandfather fell into furnishings- making by opportunity, which paid off during Singapore’s meteor country- building epoch.