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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.
A lathe is a machine tool that rotates a workpiece about an axis of rotation to perform various operations such as cutting, sanding, knurling, drilling, deformation, facing, and turning, with tools that are applied to the workpiece to create an object with symmetry about that axis.
A chair is a type of seat, typically designed for one person and consisting of one or more legs, a flat or slightly angled seat and a back-rest. They may be made of wood, metal, or synthetic materials, and may be padded or upholstered in various colors and fabrics.
Spindle may refer to:
Woodturning is the craft of using a wood lathe with hand-held tools to cut a shape that is symmetrical around the axis of rotation. Like the potter's wheel, the wood lathe is a mechanism that can generate a variety of forms. The operator is known as a turner, and the skills needed to use the tools were traditionally known as turnery. In pre-industrial England, these skills were sufficiently difficult to be known as "the mysteries of the turners' guild." The skills to use the tools by hand, without a fixed point of contact with the wood, distinguish woodturning and the wood lathe from the machinist's lathe, or metal-working lathe.
A table is an item of furniture with a raised flat top and is supported most commonly by 1 or 4 legs, used as a surface for working at, eating from or on which to place things. Some common types of table are the dining room table, which is used for seated persons to eat meals; the coffee table, which is a low table used in living rooms to display items or serve refreshments; and the bedside table, which is commonly used to place an alarm clock and a lamp. There are also a range of specialized types of tables, such as drafting tables, used for doing architectural drawings, and sewing tables.
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.
Rocaille was a French style of exuberant decoration, with an abundance of curves, counter-curves, undulations and elements modeled on nature, that appeared in furniture and interior decoration during the early reign of Louis XV of France. It was a reaction against the heaviness and formality of the Louis XIV style. It began in about 1710, reached its peak in the 1730s, and came to an end in the late 1750s, replaced by Neoclassicism. It was the beginning of the French Baroque movement in furniture and design, and also marked the beginning of the Rococo movement, which spread to Italy, Bavaria and Austria by the mid-18th century.
The forms of Chinese furniture evolved along three distinct lineages which dates back to 1000 BC, based on frame and panel, yoke and rack and bamboo construction techniques. Chinese home furniture evolved independently of Western furniture into many similar forms including chairs, tables, stools, cupboards, cabinets, beds and sofas. Until about the 10th century CE the Chinese sat on mats or low platforms using low tables, but then gradually moved to using high tables with chairs.
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.
Louis XVI style, also called Louis Seize, is a style of architecture, furniture, decoration and art which developed in France during the 19-year reign of Louis XVI (1774–1793), just before the French Revolution. It saw the final phase of the Baroque style as well as the birth of French Neoclassicism. The style was a reaction against the elaborate ornament of the preceding Baroque period. It was inspired in part by the discoveries of Ancient Roman paintings, sculpture and architecture in Herculaneum and Pompeii. Its features included the straight column, the simplicity of the post-and-lintel, the architrave of the Greek temple. It also expressed the Rousseau-inspired values of returning to nature and the view of nature as an idealized and wild but still orderly and inherently worthy model for the arts to follow.
A stool is a raised seat commonly supported by three or four legs, but with neither armrests nor a backrest, and typically built to accommodate one occupant. As some of the earliest forms of seat, stools are sometimes called backless chairs despite how some modern stools have backrests. Folding stools can be collapsed into a flat, compact form typically by rotating the seat in parallel with fold-up legs.
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.
A cabinet is a case or cupboard with shelves and/or drawers for storing or displaying items. Some cabinets are stand alone while others are built in to a wall or are attached to it like a medicine cabinet. Cabinets are typically made of wood, coated steel, or synthetic materials. Commercial grade cabinets usually have a melamine-particleboard substrate and are covered in a high pressure decorative laminate, commonly referred to as Wilsonart or Formica.
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.
A ladderback chair, also ladder-back chair, slatback chair or fiddle back although that name is used less now due to the creation of the fiddle back chair. It gets its name from the horizontal spindles that serve as the back support on them and are reminiscent of a ladder.
The furniture of the Louis XV period (1715-1774) is characterized by curved forms, lightness, comfort and asymmetry; it replaced the more formal, boxlike and massive furniture of the Louis XIV style. It employed marquetry, using inlays of exotic woods of different colors, as well as ivory and mother of pearl.
Louis XIV furniture was massive and lavishly covered with sculpture and ornament of gilded bronze in the earlier part of the personal rule of King Louis XIV of France (1660–1690). After about 1690, thanks in large part to the furniture designer André Charles Boulle, a more original and delicate style appeared, sometimes known as Boulle work. It was based on the use of marquetry, the inlay of piece of ebony and other rare woods, a technique first used in Florence in the 15th century, which was refined and developed by Boulle and others working for the King. Furniture was inlaid with thin plaques of ebony, copper, mother of pearl, and exotic woods of different colors in elaborate designs.
Louis XVI furniture is characterized by elegance and neoclassicism, a return to ancient Greek and Roman models. Much of it was designed and made for Queen Marie Antoinette for the new apartments she created in the Palace of Versailles, Palace of Fontainebleau, the Tuileries Palace, and other royal residences. The finest craftsmen of the time, including Jean-Henri Riesener, Georges Jacob, Martin Carlin, and Jean-François Leleu, were engaged to design and make her furniture.
