Fantastic Furniture

Fantastic Furniture is an Australian owned and operated furniture retailer with over 70 Fantastic Furniture stores around Australia. It is renowned for offering consumers quality furniture at an affordable price. The phrase “The Package Deal Kings” is synonymous with the company, allowing consumers to bundle their furniture as a package. Fantastic Furniture operates under Fantastic Holdings Limited (FHL).

History

Fantastic Furniture started as a market stall at Sydney’s Park-lea Markets in 1989, by friends Paul Harding and Jonathan De Jong, selling outdoor furniture. Two years later, the first Fantastic Furniture public store opened at Birkenhead Point, New South Wales (NSW).

The following year the Fantastic Lounge Factory (FLF) opened and started production on an exclusive range of Australian made sofas and lounges for Fantastic Furniture.

During this time, the Fantastic Furniture brand grew rapidly, however, the business couldn’t keep up with the demand and in 1996 it went into administration. The business was subsequently acquired by Peter Brennan, Peter Draper and Julian Tertini and underwent a restructure. Over the next few years a number of Fantastic Furniture stores opened across NSW, and in 1999 the first Fantastic Furniture catalogue was distributed to over 1 million households. That same year, FHL was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX:FAN).

Fantastic

The fantastic is a subgenre of literary works characterized by the ambiguous presentation of seemingly supernatural forces. Structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov originated the concept, characterizing the fantastic as the hesitation of characters and readers when presented with questions about reality.

Definition

The fantastic can be seen in works where the reader has a sense of confusion about whether a work presents what Todorov calls "the uncanny," wherein superficially supernatural phenomena turn out to have a rational explanation (such as in the Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe) or "the marvelous," where the supernatural is accepted as real. He also points out that the ending always drives the hesitation towards one of two decisions:

The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work -- in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations.