Apparently this is popular thing in the Northwest....
THERE is nothing particularly unusual about the living room of the two-story town house that Scott Veazie shares with his wife in Washougal, Wash., except for one piece of furniture in a corner: a full-size replica of the captain’s chair from the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, as seen in the original “Star Trek” television series.
Mr. Veazie, 27, was not yet born when that show first went on the air in the 1960s; even his parents were only teenagers. During his childhood, there were “Star Trek” spinoffs on TV with more sophisticated special effects than the original, and a more contemporary sensibility, and there were also movies featuring the old show’s actors aboard updated versions of the Enterprise. But Mr. Veazie, who watched endless reruns of the original series with his mother in the 1980s, was never drawn to those later incarnations.
“The original show was the first one I saw,” he said. “It was so idealistic. A lot of us kids wanted to be Captain Kirk — and part of that was the chair.”
Mr. Veazie, a manager at Underwriters Laboratories, built the chair himself last year, and has been gratified to find, since installing it in the living room in May, that “when someone comes in, it’s the first thing they comment on.”
Serious Trekkies have long fashioned copies of their favorite costumes and props, and, back in the ’70s and ’80s, a few even put together homemade knockoffs of the captain’s chair, using reference materials like the “Starfleet Technical Manual” and “U.S.S. Enterprise Bridge Blueprints.”
But lately fans like Mr. Veazie have been building or buying more sophisticated versions of the command module from which James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner, ordered “Ahead, warp factor six.” Moreover, they are making them the centerpiece of their homes, thus conquering what is for them a final frontier of domestic décor.
At a moment when yet another movie is about to present yet another revamped Enterprise (this one claiming to be the original vessel of the young Kirk, Spock and McCoy), these traditionalists are holding their ground.
Drawing on a wide variety of new sources, including construction-oriented Web sites, Web-based entrepreneurs who supply kits of parts, and a Maryland company that just started selling ready-made chairs for $2,700 a piece, they are making a definitive statement to the world, or at least to their friends and families.
“The closet command-chair Trekkies have come out of the closet,” said Keith Marshall, 45, an unemployed phlebotomist, emergency medical technician, corrections officer and firefighter whose uncompleted chair, currently sitting in his brother’s garage, is slated for his own living room in Bonney Lake, Wash. “For a lot of people in the last few years,” Mr. Marshall added, “the pieces have come together.”
The current wave of interest seems to have started after the original chair was auctioned for $305,000 in 2002 and subsequently displayed at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, where “Star Trek” loyalists could view it up close. (Not coincidentally, perhaps, the chair’s devotees tend to be clustered in the Northwest.)
The spread of digital video also helped the cause, allowing hobbyists to freeze-frame shots of the chair and scrutinize it from every angle. On message boards like Dewback Wing A.S.A.P.: A Site About Props, they swap and compare screen grabs, measurements, schematics and spare parts.
etc
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/garde ... nted=print
