Traditional Arabian Furniture in Modern Design
The furniture industry in Syria finds traditional Arabian furniture combined with modern design and techniques. With an expensive price tag having to be placed on traditional furniture because of the time and handicraft involved, many people cannot afford this luxury. Many manufacturers, therefore, have used the latest technology and power tools to produce furniture quickly after designing the piece on a computer. With most locals not having the financial ability to buy the furniture, much is exported to other countries. Contemporary furniture became a necessity in some shops since modern pieces do not have to have the expensive price that the traditional ones do.
There are factories that produce furniture upholstery fabric in colorful modern designs using the latest equipment.
There are those craftsmen who learned the trade down through the generations, however, and continue to enjoy making such items as mother-of-pearl inserts into furniture by hand even if some pieces take months to complete. This type of furniture became a revered decorative art in the 16th and 17th centuries and were also very popular in the 19th century used on French furniture as well as traditional Islamic ones. Damascus was the main city that perfected this method of covering pieces of wooden furniture completely with mother-of-pearl bordered with a fine silver or pewter wire to hold the inserts in place. Other geometric inlays are made of fruit wood and are also a Damascus specialty.
Tourists have to be careful to somehow be able to tell high-quality goods from those cheaply-made knock-offs by beginning carpenters who don't really know what they are doing and think that a short-term workshop makes them experts when, in fact, that skill takes many years to develop.
