Furniture refers to objects intended to support various human activities such as seating, eating (tables), storing items, working, and sleeping. Furniture is also used to hold objects at a convenient height for work, or to store things. Furniture can be a product of design and can be considered a form of decorative art. In addition to furniture's functional role, it can serve a symbolic or religious purpose. It can be made from a vast multitude of materials, including metal, plastic, and wood. Furniture can be made using a variety of woodworking joints which often reflects the local culture.
Joinery is a part of woodworking that involves joining pieces of wood, engineered lumber, or synthetic substitutes, to produce more complex items. Some woodworking joints employ mechanical fasteners, bindings, or adhesives, while others use only wood elements.
George Hepplewhite was a cabinetmaker. He is regarded as having been one of the "big three" English furniture makers of the 18th century, along with Thomas Sheraton and Thomas Chippendale. There are no pieces of furniture made by Hepplewhite or his firm known to exist but he gave his name to a distinctive style of light, elegant furniture that was fashionable between about 1775 and 1800 and reproductions of his designs continued through the following centuries. One characteristic that is seen in many of his designs is a shield-shaped chair back, where an expansive shield appeared in place of a narrower splat design.
Chairs are known from Ancient Egypt and have been widespread in the Western world from the Greeks and Romans onwards. They were in common use in China from the twelfth century, and were used by the Aztecs. In Sub-Saharan Africa, chairs were not in use before introduction by Europeans.
A footstool is a piece of furniture or a support used to elevate the feet. There are two main types of footstool, which can be loosely categorized into those designed for comfort and those designed for function.
A lowboy is an American collectors term for one type of dressing table. It is a small table with one or two rows of drawers, so called in contradistinction to the tallboy or highboy chest of drawers.
Campaign furniture is a type of furniture which is made for travel. Historically, much of it was made for military campaigns.
A Windsor chair is a chair built with a solid wooden seat into which the chair-back and legs are round-tenoned, or pushed into drilled holes, in contrast to other styles of chairs whose back legs and back uprights are continuous. The seats of Windsor chairs are often carved into a shallow dish or saddle shape for comfort. Traditionally, the legs, stretchers, and uprights were usually turned on a pole lathe. Spindles may also be carved, using drawknives and spokeshaves. The back and sometimes the arm pieces are formed from steam bent pieces of wood. Traditional Windsors are typically painted, primarily to hide the different types of wood used in construction, based on their characteristics.
A canapé is a piece of furniture similar to a couch. The word is typically meant to describe an elegant couch made out of elaborately carved wood with wooden legs, an upholstered back, armrests, and single long seat that typically seats three, that emerged from France in the 18th century.
A club foot is a type of rounded foot for a piece of furniture, such as the end of a chair leg. It is also known by the alternative names pad foot and Dutch foot, the latter sometimes corrupted into duck foot.
A lyre arm is an element of design in furniture, architecture and the decorative arts, wherein a shape is employed to emulate the geometry of a lyre; the original design of this element is from the Classical Greek period, simply reflecting the stylistic design of the musical instrument. One of the earliest uses extant of the lyre design in the Christian era is a 6th-century AD gravestone with lyre design in double volute form. In a furniture context, the design is often associated with a scrolling effect of the arms of a chair or sofa. The lyre arm design arises in many periods of furniture, including Neoclassical schools and in particular the American Federal Period and the Victorian era. Well known designers who employed this stylistic element include the noted New York City furniture designer Duncan Phyfe.
The Queen Anne style of furniture design developed before, during, and after the time of Queen Anne, who reigned from 1702 to 1714.
Turned chairs — sometimes called thrown chairs or spindle chairs — represent a style of Elizabethan or Jacobean turned furniture that were in vogue in the late 16th and early 17th century England, New England and Holland. In turned furniture, the individual wooden spindles of the piece are made by shaping them with chisels and gouges while they are being turned on a lathe. Joiners or carpenters who made such furniture were termed "turners", or "bodgers", hence the surname Turner. Today, turned chairs — as well as various turned decorative elements — are still commonly made, but by machines rather than by hand.
Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse is a painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London by the British artist William Hogarth. It was painted in approximately 1757 and published as a print in etching and engraving in 1758, with its final and sixth state in 1764. Hogarth used this particular self-portrait as the frontispiece of his collected engravings, published in 1764.
Italian Rococo interior design refers to interior decoration in Italy during the Rococo period, which went from the early 18th century to around the 1760s.
A foot is the floor level termination of furniture legs. Legless furniture may be slightly raised off of the floor by their feet.
Ancient furniture was made of many different materials, including reeds, wood, stone, metals, straws, and ivory. It could also be decorated in many different ways. Sometimes furniture would be covered with upholstery, upholstery being padding, springs, webbing, and leather. Features which would mark the top of furniture, called finials, were common. To decorate furniture, contrasting pieces would be inserted into depressions in the furniture. This practice is called inlaying.
What later came to be known as the William and Mary style is a furniture design common from 1700 to 1725 in the Netherlands, Kingdom of England, Kingdom of Scotland and Kingdom of Ireland, and later in England's American colonies. It was a transitional style between Mannerist furniture and Queen Anne furniture. Sturdy, emphasizing both straight lines and curves, and featuring elaborate carving and woodturning, the style was one of the first to imitate Asian design elements such as japanning.
A corner chair is a chair design with a four-corner seat arranged in a way that one corner, sometimes rounded, frequently with a cabriole leg, is positioned in front while the rounded or angled backrest is aligned with the two back sides of the seat.
