With little furniture, no backdrops except for a few curtains, and everything painted black, the atmosphere is claustrophobic and often nightmarish.

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Heather Maskill, who owns the Little Furniture Shop on Wyle Cop, said parking was an issue, but it was the same in towns across the country.

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They whimpered and jumped about on the piled furniture, little ball-like humps in the darkness, until I finally managed to shoo them out the door and down the steps to where their mother would presumably reclaim them.

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To prevent accidents, parents should tie up any cords from blinds or curtains, high enough out of a child's reach, and make sure there is no furniture placed close by that would invite little ones to climb.

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"Furniture, cutlery, power tools - will be little more than material billboards for a vast, interactive, postindustrial support system", err, you're losing me now Bruce.

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But look a little closer and you will notice several changes, including sensors and displays embedded in the furniture, which know when you arrive in the office and will automatically bring up your computer settings.

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Anything after that might be a little anticlimactic, but the last large gallery provides a capsule view of the Bauhaus, with furniture by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van de Rohe, and paintings by Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and Lyonel Feininger, among others, along with the occasional poster.

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"It's going to put a little bit more money in everybody's pockets, " says Myron Gersh, president of Armourdale Furniture Co.

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In the afternoon, we rent a little local home in one of the prettiest backstreets, a tiny town-house filled with heavily lacquered antique furniture, glowering sepia photographs of ancestors and an aged television perfect for watching equally vintage Turkish soap operas.

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