Asian Furniture Can Be More
Than You Bargained For

While poking through dusty furniture shops in Bali early last year, Susan Sadler was bewitched by a pair of teak end tables. Little did she know, as she handed over $200 and arranged to have the pieces shipped home, that she was also buying an army of tiny termites who have spent the last year transforming the once-elegant pieces into a pile of dust.

"When you looked at it there, there was no way to tell," says Mrs. Sadler. "But eventually, this whole thing will disintegrate."

For eager shoppers, there's little more satisfying than discovering a divine divan or a to-die-for Tibetan chest in some out-of-the-way store. And there's little more traumatic than trying to get it back home. Living rooms around the globe are littered with Asian furniture purchases gone awry: pieces that arrived at their destinations -- and not all of them do -- looking, feeling, even smelling different than when they left the shop.

For her part, Mrs. Sadler has had trouble letting go. After the pile of dust began to form at the base of the tables, she moved them from her bedroom to a guestroom. She now realizes that the dust, in this case, will never truly settle. The Salvation Army is set to come later this month to retrieve the hollowed-out tables, says Mrs. Sadler, a Singapore-based advertising consultant.

Mark Cochrane's furniture problem was nothing to sniff at. Mr. Cochrane bought a latticework bookcase at a Chinese antique store in Macau. It arrived at his Hong Kong apartment well-wrapped in sturdy, corrugated cardboard -- and reeking of fish. The stench soon pervaded the apartment.

"Maybe they shipped it over in a sampan [fishing boat]," he says wryly. The odor proved deep-seated. First, he and his girlfriend tried wiping it down with a damp rag, to no avail. "Then we used a lemon wax to try to cover it up. We had lemony fish for a while," he says. Mr. Cochrane still refers to it as the "fish piece."

There's nothing fishy about the enduring demand for handcrafted Asian furniture. CV. Adhi Darma Cargo, an Indonesian shipper, estimates its volume is up about 50% from three years ago, with the bulk coming from small importers in Australia and the U.S. that buy furniture, carvings and crafts for resale. Meanwhile, Karin Weber, a Hong Kong antique dealer, has started a business leading shopping trips to southern China to help consumers intelligently sift through rows and rows of trunks and chests and tables.

Why the popularity? First, there are great deals. Prices in furniture destinations such as Shanghai, Bali and Macau are a sliver of those in Hong Kong or Tokyo, London or New York. Exoticism is another factor. For many, discovering a unique piece in some side-street store or tucked into the corner of a cavernous warehouse is more rewarding than trotting down to the local department store.

Add to this convenience, which is growing. In Macau, even the smaller shops have English-speaking salespeople and can send via photos e-mail of their furniture. In China, there's a network of scouts in the hinterlands who collect and buy pieces and then ship them to Beijing, Shanghai, Zhuhai and other refinishing centers. In Tibet, some stores will ship your pieces by express mail.

Yes, the options are great. But among furniture shoppers, the horror stories are legion.

Before moving back to the U.S. after a two-year stint in Hong Kong and Singapore, retail executive Susan Kosinski and her husband traveled to Bali. The island is famed for its shimmering, stepped rice paddies and resort pools overlooking the Indian Ocean. But the Kosinskis were there to shop. At the end of a week of rummaging through dozens of stores on a busy strip called Jalan Legian, the couple filled a container with their $1,000 bounty: an armoire, a sofa, a large day bed, a poster bed with night tables, eight outdoor chairs and three tables.

To be safe, they paid $1,500 for a highly recommended shipper, CAS Cargo Bali. They gave instructions to have the pieces fumigated, tightly crated and shipped to Oakland, California, ahead of their move back home to nearby San Francisco.

The furniture made it to the port, but not quite as planned. Instead of a wooden crate, the pieces arrived bundled in cardboard liner, shrink-wrapped and placed on a wooden pallet after making stops in Papua New Guinea, Singapore and Los Angeles (for an extra charge).

Somewhere along the way, arm rails on the day bed were cracked, a sofa drawer was smashed, and the armoire arrived crushed and infested with wood beetles and -- surprise -- termites. "We had a guy come over to look at the furniture and he told me to spray it with a termite-killer and then tape the piece to the floor so bugs wouldn't escape and get into our wood home," says Mrs. Kosinski's husband, Richard.

Beetles are bugging others, too. In fact, they have crawled into high-stakes global-trade talks. U.S. officials last year demanded that Chinese exporters start heat-treating their packing crates to kill off wood-boring beetles. The highly destructive Asian beetles first showed up in Brooklyn, New York, in 1996, and have set off infestation scares from Manhattan's Central Park to Chicago. (Not to be outdone, Chinese officials later demanded that U.S. exporters treat their pine packing crates for a tiny parasite known as the pinewood nematode.)

Meanwhile, the Kosinskis' shipping tale is something of an international mystery. Eddie Fitzgerald, a CAS Cargo Bali executive, says the furniture left his warehouse packed carefully in a crate and bug-free, as do all of his shipments. He doesn't even have shrink-wrap facilities. He says he doesn't know who the guilty the party is, but suspects that somewhere along the way it was dropped from a forklift, hastily repackaged and sent on to the next stop.

There would have been plenty of opportunities for that to happen. On a long trip, crates are often removed from their containers by consolidators at various ports of call. They are then repacked into new containers in a juggling act aimed at keeping the containers full for the next leg of the trip, Mr. Fitzgerald says.

Of course, furniture shopping in Asia doesn't always end with bugs, bad odors and breakage. For every tale of woe there are customers getting great pleasure from their acquisitions. "It's fun to do it on your own. There's a sense of adventure that adds to the draw of the piece," says John Erdos, owner of four Asian furniture galleries, three of them in New York and one in Singapore.

But only if the adventure has a happy ending.

While on holiday in Sri Lanka in November 1998, Derek Jones spied an antique armoire and two rosewood chairs he couldn't resist. Mr. Jones, an architect, had just moved to Hong Kong from the U.S. and was looking to furnish his still-empty apartment. In the town of Bentota on the southwestern Sri Lankan coast, he saw the chance to do it stylishly and economically. With his hotel having vouched for the shop's reputation, Mr. Jones laid out $630, returned home, and waited. And waited. And waited.

"I figured it would arrive just in time for Christmas," Mr. Jones recalls. "So I held off getting any furniture for the new place." By the time holiday had come and gone, he was still sitting on cushions on his living room floor. A series of faxes and calls to the store led nowhere. His vague threats of legal action also accomplished nothing. "The response was always, 'We'll look into it.' But they never returned my calls."

A year later he just gave up.

"If you're a one-off buyer, you could get ripped off. They know it's not worth your while to come all the way back," says Michelle Tan, who runs Eclectic Attic, an antique store in Singapore.

In many countries, buyers have little recourse. "Try to sue someone in an Indian court, and you're lucky if the case will be heard in 10 years' time," says Ms. Tan. She herself has been stiffed -- by suppliers in Indonesia, she says, who substituted orders with inferior items, apparently willing to forgo future business for a quick profit.

Insurance would seem to be the obvious answer. Yet it's hardly a cure-all. Verona Keating had to pester one Indonesian insurance company for a solid year before it handed over the $5,000 she claimed in damages for one shipment gone awry. "I made their life hell," says Ms. Keating. That battle, along with numerous other bang-ups and bug incidents, left its mark on her, too. Ms. Keating, who with a friend had been arranging mass shipments of cheap Indonesian furniture for friends in Japan, decided to find a new vocation.

Joe Bauer proved, definitively, that furniture shopping can be a health hazard. Shortly after moving to Singapore from Hong Kong in 1996, he developed painful rashes all over his body. When he went away on business trips, they cleared up; when he came back to his new apartment, they worsened. He had to cancel all his meetings on one trip to Jakarta because his legs swelled so severely that he could barely walk, much less get his pants on.

Alarmed and mystified, he went to see his doctor in Singapore, who took one look at the blotches running down the back of his legs and made his diagnosis: a sexually transmitted disease.

Unsatisfied with that unsettling assessment, Mr. Bauer got a second opinion from a doctor in Hong Kong who said several patients of his had suffered allergic reactions to furniture they had bought in China. Sure enough, Mr. Bauer had bought a Chinese table in Macau just before the move. "I realized I'd sat on the table before my couch arrived; I got a rash on the back of my legs. Another time, I'd put my feet up on it; rash on my feet. I'd set up my computer on it and leaned on the table; rash on my arms."

It turned out that chemicals used to mix shellacs and glazes were to blame. Mr. Bauer hauled his table onto his patio -- getting a rash on his hands in the process -- and let it bake in the sun. After a few days, the chemicals burned off. He's been rash-free ever since.

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A Shipping Check-List

Allergic reactions. Fish smells. Some furniture woes are hard to anticipate. But others are probably avoidable. Here's a few tips to help you avert a furniture-buying disaster.

Dust for Fingerprints: Bug infestation is a common lament among furniture shoppers in Asia. A suggestion: If you see 'cones' of sawdust inside a piece of furniture you're thinking about buying, investigate further. "Perhaps that's a sign that the little critters are working their way into the wood and it's best to shop elsewhere," says Richard Kosinski, who with his wife bought a living-room full of teak in Bali last year that turned out to be riddled with termites. There have been furniture shipments from China and Taiwan in which the pieces themselves were untouched by bugs, but the wooden crating material was infested.

Document Everything: Take detailed photos of your intended purchase before it leaves the shop, and identify any defects with the shop owner and shipper. If there's any battles later on with the shop, shipper or insurance company, you'll be better armed with photographic evidence.

Split the Bill: Most shops will require you to pay in full at the time of purchase -- but try to negotiate to pay 50% up front and the balance (via wire) when it arrives. It gives you leverage in case something goes wrong.

Shop for a Shipper: Before you leave home, you may want to contact a shipper in your home country to see if they have a local partner in the country to which you are traveling. And if you're sending extremely valuable antiques, you'll probably want to use a specialty shipper rather than a regular household moving firm.

Read the Fine Print: You may negotiate a great price on your furniture, only to get charged a high fee for crating and packing. Or, you may think "delivery included" means to your front door, when in fact it's to your home port. "There's a lot of unseen extras that most people just don't consider," warns John Erdos, owner of the John Erdos gallery in Singapore and Jamson Whyte gallery in New York. One Tokyo resident, Verona Keating, says it costs her a minimum of $700 to clear a piece of furniture through customs in nearby Yokohama and get it delivered to her home. She says the process is so complicated there that many people hire customs brokers to handle the paperwork.

Pick Your Packing: Make sure your piece is professionally packed; the shop should wrap the furniture in corrugated cardboard and then make a wooden crate for it. Some movers use bubble wrap; demand that they put tissue between the wrap and your piece. If the furniture is heading into, or through, a warmer climate, the bubble wrap can fuse onto the paint or glaze, leaving tiny circular marks over the surface. "You'll wind up paying to refinish it, on top of your other costs," warns Karin Weber, owner of Weber Antiques in Hong Kong.

Take Cover: Insure the shipment for its full value -- and don't skimp on the policy. With some policies, there are large deductibles and exclusions that make collecting on the policy all but impossible. Determine what is covered and what is not.

-- Cris Prystay and Jon E. Hilsenrath

Email your comments to rjeditor@dowjones.com.