There an intriguing piece, complete with a picture, in today's New York Times about the influence of the domestic DVD machine on furniture. First three paragraphs:

The $23-billion-a-year furniture industry is in a state of high excitement over an item of furniture that, in the average living room, looks like a huge Danish. Your local bakery would call it a bear claw. The furniture industry calls it home theater seating.

With the ascent of DVD players, flat-screen and high-definition television and surround-sound home "theaters in a box" as standard equipment in American households, the furnishings of media rooms and movie theaters are descending into the mass-marketplace.

The new home theater seating is typically a free-standing unit of three or four reclinerlike modules attached at the hip by cup holders and eating trays, features more typically found in multiplexes or screening rooms. It is now generally available and affordable — a question of hundreds or thousands of dollars and not tens of thousands. Since its introduction by Berkline, a furniture company in Morristown, Tenn., in 1999, home theater seating has proved popular enough to encourage most other major players in the business of "motion" furniture (a k a recliners) to jump into the fray.

Ah, but what happens when the kids start having home cinemas in their bedrooms?