April 17, 1986

FURNITURE buyers from around the nation convene here at the Southern Furniture Market twice a year to buy for department and furniture stores back home. At the spring market, which began April 10 and will continue through April 18, they found that new furniture introductions generally avoided extremes in favor of conservative designs and the perennial classics. There was little Post Modern furniture, less Memphis (the radical Milanese furniture design movement), and no avant-garde art furniture, but extended lines of reproduction furniture and new, historically-inspired collections. The most significant trends were perhaps not those of style but of versatility. Manufacturers presented dozens of motorized recliners, chairs and sectionals at prices starting at $299. Many manufacturers produced highly versatile modular seating units with optional foldaway sofa beds, chaises longues and motorized or manually operated incliners. Evolution rather than revolution was the rule. Baker Furniture, for example, extended its long-established line of fine reproduction, 18th-century furniture into heavier, claw-footed 19th-century styles. The Century Company introduced a group of about 60 by the New York designer Jay Spectre. The collection was inspired by modern classics of this century, especially Art Deco. Furniture upholstered with fabrics of Southwestern designs were popular, even on furniture that would be sold outside the Southwest.

Mayor Koch announced yesterday that his administration wants to rezone almost half the city - allowing greater population density in many of the residential neighborhoods outside Manhattan - as one way to spur private developers to build ''large-scale, moderate-income housing.'' The Mayor would also establish a housing trust fund by taxing hotel guests and the sellers or buyers of cooperative apartments, speed up or even eliminate certain city approvals and reviews, waive taxes and fees for builders and liberalize the building code to permit cheaper materials. ''The need to address the city's long-term housing crisis has never been greater,'' Mr. Koch said at a news conference in City Hall. ''Only by taking bold, innovative steps will we be able to provide all New Yorkers with a decent place to live.''

With the Senate Finance Committee continuing to approve generous tax benefits for a wide variety of Americans, a senior White House official questioned today whether the drive for tax-revision legislation could be sustained. ''It's not dead, but it's moribund,'' said the official, a strong advocate of President Reagan's tax proposals. The official's comments were the latest indication that tax legislation, one of the President's top legislative priorities, was in serious trouble. Last week, the Senate voted by an overwhelming margin to give budget reduction higher priority than tax revision.

The United States has ordered the evacuation of the 200 dependents of American Embassy personnel in the Sudan because of concern over Libyan-directed violence against Americans there, Administration officials said today. The evacuation, which is expected by the end of the week, was ordered after a 33-year-old embassy communications officer, William J. Cokals, was shot and seriously wounded in the head in Khartoum by an unknown assailant as he was driving home Tuesday night. He was flown to Jidda, Saudi Arabia, where he was hospitalized with a bullet wound in the head that partly paralyzed him.

The lawyer for Jay L. Turoff, the city's former Taxi Commissioner, said yesterday that state investigators had no evidence to support allegations that his client committed corrupt acts while in office. The lawyer, Edward M. Rappaport, said, however, that Mr. Turoff would refuse to testify about the accusations at a hearing today of the State Commission of Investigation. Mr. Rappaport said he had advised Mr. Turoff against testifying because he had already ''categorically denied'' the charges at private sessions of the commission. ''The only purpose of the hearing is a publicity stunt,'' Mr. Rappaport said. ''They are trying to turn this into a minstrel show.''