Small-cap home furnishings stocks have managed to outperform their larger peers on the Australian sharemarket so far this year, thanks to their relative defensiveness against the online retail onslaught.

Fantastic Holdings , Nick Scali and Kresta Holdings have done better than the S&P/ASX 200 retail index’s 31.3 per cent fall so far this year, as historically high household savings rates keep consumers away from the tills.