Furniture refers to movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating, eating (tables), storing items, eating and/or working with an item, 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.
The Eastlake movement was a nineteenth-century architectural and household design reform movement started by British architect and writer Charles Eastlake (1836–1906). The movement is generally considered part of the late Victorian period in terms of broad antique furniture designations. In architecture the Eastlake style or Eastlake architecture is part of the Queen Anne style of Victorian architecture.
Frank Heyling Furness was an American architect of the Victorian era. He designed more than 600 buildings, most in the Philadelphia area, and is remembered for his diverse, muscular, often unordinarily scaled buildings, and for his influence on the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan. Furness also received a Medal of Honor for bravery during the Civil War.
Alfred Waterhouse was an English architect, particularly associated with the Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, although he designed using other architectural styles as well. He is perhaps best known for his designs for Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum in London, although he also built a wide variety of other buildings throughout the country. Besides his most famous public buildings he designed other town halls, the Manchester Assize buildings—bombed in World War II—and the adjacent Strangeways Prison. He also designed several hospitals, the most architecturally interesting being the Royal Infirmary Liverpool and University College Hospital London. He was particularly active in designing buildings for universities, including both Oxford and Cambridge but also what became Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds universities. He designed many country houses, the most important being Eaton Hall in Cheshire, largely demolished in 1961-63. He designed several bank buildings and offices for insurance companies, most notably the Prudential Assurance Company. Although not a major church designer he produced several notable churches and chapels. He was both a member of The Royal Institute of British Architects, of which he served a term as President, and a Royal Academician, acting as Treasurer for the Royal Academy.
Néo-Grec was a Neoclassical Revival style of the mid-to-late 19th century that was popularized in architecture, the decorative arts, and in painting during France's Second Empire, or the reign of Napoleon III (1852–1870). The Néo-Grec vogue took as its starting point the earlier expressions of the Neoclassical style inspired by 18th-century excavations at Pompeii, which resumed in earnest in 1848, and similar excavations at Herculaneum. The style mixed elements of the Graeco-Roman, Pompeian, Adam and Egyptian Revival styles into "a richly eclectic polychrome mélange." "The style enjoyed a vogue in the United States, and had a short-lived impact on interior design in England and elsewhere."
William Burges was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoclassical architectural style and re-establish the architectural and social values of a utopian medieval England. Burges stands within the tradition of the Gothic Revival, his works echoing those of the Pre-Raphaelites and heralding those of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Wood carving is one of the oldest arts of humankind. Wooden spears from the Middle Paleolithic, such as the Clacton Spear, reveal how humans have engaged in utilitarian woodwork for millennia. However, given the relatively rapid rate at which wood decays in most environments, there are only isolated ancient artifacts remaining.
The Tower House, 29 Melbury Road, is a late-Victorian townhouse in the Holland Park district of Kensington and Chelsea, London, built by the architect and designer William Burges as his home. Designed between 1875 and 1881, in the French Gothic Revival style, it was described by the architectural historian J. Mordaunt Crook as "the most complete example of a medieval secular interior produced by the Gothic Revival, and the last". The house is built of red brick, with Bath stone dressings and green roof slates from Cumbria, and has a distinctive cylindrical tower and conical roof. The ground floor contains a drawing room, a dining room and a library, while the first floor has two bedrooms and an armoury. Its exterior and the interior echo elements of Burges's earlier work, particularly Park House in Cardiff and Castell Coch. It was designated a Grade I listed building in 1949.
The Anglo-Japanese style developed in the United Kingdom through the Victorian period and early Edwardian period from approximately 1851 to the 1910s, when a new appreciation for Japanese design and culture influenced how designers and craftspeople made British art, especially the decorative arts and architecture of England, covering a vast array of art objects including ceramics, furniture and interior design. Important centres for design included London and Glasgow.
The Nationality Rooms are a group of 31 classrooms in the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning depicting and donated by the national and ethnic groups that helped build the city of Pittsburgh. The rooms are designated as a Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation historical landmark and are located on the 1st and 3rd floors of the Cathedral of Learning, itself a national historic landmark, on the University of Pittsburgh's main campus in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Although of museum caliber, 29 of the 31 rooms are used as daily classrooms by University of Pittsburgh faculty and students, while the other two are display rooms viewed through glass doors, utilized primarily for special events, and can only be explored via special guided tour. The Nationality Rooms also serve in a vigorous program of intercultural involvement and exchange in which the original organizing committees for the rooms remain as participants and which includes a program of annual student scholarship to facilitate study abroad. In addition, the Nationality Rooms inspire lectures, seminars, concerts exhibitions, and social events which focus on the various heritages and traditions of the nations represented. The national, traditional, and religious holidays of the nations represented are celebrated on campus and the rooms are appropriately decorated to reflect these occasions. The Nationality Rooms are available daily for public tours as long as the particular room is not being used for a class or other university function.
Daniel Pabst was a German-born American cabinetmaker of the Victorian Era. He is credited with some of the most extraordinary custom interiors and hand-crafted furniture in the United States. Sometimes working in collaboration with architect Frank Furness (1839–1912), he made pieces in the Renaissance Revival, Neo-Grec, Modern Gothic, and Colonial Revival styles. Examples of his work are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
William Lightfoot Price was an American architect, a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete, and a founder of the utopian communities of Arden, Delaware and Rose Valley, Pennsylvania.
The Judges' Lodgings, formerly a town house and now a museum, is located between Church Street and Castle Hill, Lancaster, Lancashire, England. It is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building. The building is the oldest existing town house in Lancaster, and was also the first house in Lancaster to have shutters. It was used by judges when they attended the sessions of the Assize Court.
Kimbel & Cabus was a Victorian-era furniture and decorative arts firm based in New York City. The partnership was formed in 1862 between German-born cabinetmaker Anthony Kimbel and French-born cabinetmaker Joseph Cabus (1824–1894). The company was noted for its Modern Gothic and Anglo-Japanese style furniture, which it popularized at the 1876 Centennial Exposition.
Modern Gothic, also known as Reformed Gothic, was an Aesthetic Movement style of the 1860s and 1870s in architecture, furniture and decorative arts, that was popular in Great Britain and the United States. A rebellion against the excessive ornament of Second Empire and Rococo Revival furniture, it advocated simplicity and honesty of construction, and ornament derived from nature. Unlike the Gothic Revival, it sought not to copy Gothic designs, but to adapt them abstract them, and apply them to new forms.
Bruce James Talbert was a Scottish architect, interior designer and author, best known for his furniture designs.
Furniture created in the Art Nouveau style was prominent from the beginning of the 1890s to the beginning of the First World War in 1914. It characteristically used forms based on nature, such as vines, flowers and water lilies, and featured curving and undulating lines, sometimes known as the whiplash line, both in the form and the decoration. Other common characteristics were asymmetry and polychromy, achieved by inlaying different colored woods.
The Zodiac settle is a piece of painted furniture designed by the English architect and designer William Burges and made between 1869 and 1871. A wooden settle designed with Zodiac themes, it was made for Burges' rooms at Buckingham Street, and later moved to the drawing room of The Tower House, the home that he designed for himself in Holland Park. Burges desired to fill his home with furniture "covered with paintings, both ornaments and subjects; it not only did its duty as furniture, but spoke and told a story." At one stage the poet John Betjeman gave the settle to the novelist Evelyn Waugh, and it is now in the collection of The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum in Bedford.
Holy Trinity Church is a heritage-listed Anglican church at 141 Brookes Street, Fortitude Valley, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It is the second church on that site. It was designed by Francis Drummond Greville Stanley built from 1876 to 1877 by James Robinson. It was modified in 1920-1921, 1925 and 1929. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.
Edward Maene was a Belgian-American architectural sculptor, woodcarver and cabinetmaker.
