45 Fun Facts About Furniture

Some of the oldest surviving furniture, stone dressers and beds from around 3000 BCE, was found where?

Skara Brae in Orkney: the village lay buried in dunes until a storm in 1850 exposed its stone houses, most with a dresser facing the door and beds either side of the hearth.

The French and German words for furniture come from a Latin word meaning what?

Moveable goods: meubles and Möbel go back to Latin mobilis, 'moveable', the things a household could carry off. French names a building the opposite way, an immeuble, from immobilis.

The klismos, an elegant chair with a curved backrest, originated in which civilisation?

Ancient Greece: the klismos is known from vase paintings and 5th-century BCE gravestones, and neoclassical designers brought it back into fashion more than 2,000 years later.

Medieval furniture in northern Europe, such as heavy carved chests, was typically made of which wood?

Oak. A carved oak chest was a household's trunk as well as its cupboard, packed with clothes and tapestries for the journey to the next castle.

What was Thomas Chippendale's 1754 pattern book, the first comprehensive furniture catalogue, called?

The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director, issued in 1754 with further editions in 1755 and 1762, made 'Chippendale' shorthand for his rococo, gothic and chinoiserie style on both sides of the Atlantic.

From 1672, André-Charles Boulle's tortoiseshell marquetry furnished Versailles for which French king?

Louis XIV. Boulle began supplying the Sun King's court in 1672 and was given lodgings in the Louvre, a royal favour that freed him from the rules of the Paris trade guilds.

Thonet's No. 14 'bistro chair' of 1859 is considered the world's first what?

Mass-produced item of furniture: the No. 14 was the first chair made in series, shipped around the world in parts and screwed together wherever it was sold.

Michael Thonet made the No. 14 chair after Prince Metternich invited him to settle in which city?

Vienna. Thonet arrived in 1842 and spent five years on the interiors of the Liechtenstein Palace before perfecting the steam-bent beech chair that made his firm's name.

What do the legs and back spindles of a Windsor chair all slot into?

A solid wooden seat. Itinerant 'bodgers' turned the legs on pole lathes out in the woods, and a framer in a village workshop then fitted them into holes drilled in the seat.

Which celibate American sect made furniture so plain that it became a style?

The Shakers, first known as 'Shaking Quakers' for their ecstatic worship. With no children born into the sect, its numbers dwindled until by 2025 only one active village remained, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine.

Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel Wassily chair was inspired by what?

A bicycle. Breuer admired its light, bent steel tubing while teaching at the Bauhaus; the name Wassily came decades later, after Kandinsky took a liking to the chair.

Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich designed the Barcelona chair for which country's pavilion at that city's 1929 exposition?

Germany. The pavilion was built to host a reception for Spain's King Alfonso XIII and taken down in 1930, yet the chair designed for it is still made today and the building was rebuilt in 1986.

The Eames Lounge Chair of 1956 was introduced by which American furniture company?

Herman Miller. Charles and Ray Eames set out to make a modern version of the old English club chair, and the company has never stopped producing the result.

Arne Jacobsen designed the Egg chair for which building?

The SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. Jacobsen designed everything in it, down to the cutlery, but later refits replaced his interiors, and today only Room 606 shows the original design.

Eero Saarinen said he designed the Tulip chair to clear up 'the slum of' what?

Legs, Saarinen said, made 'an ugly, confusing, unrestful world' under chairs and tables, so his Pedestal Group for Knoll stood each chair and table on a single stem.

Eero Aarnio's 1963 Ball Chair, a hollow sphere you sit inside, is a design classic from which country?

Finland. Aarnio built the first Ball Chair himself for his family's new home, and its debut at the 1966 Cologne Furniture Fair became his international breakthrough.

Which Danish designer's Round Chair seated both Kennedy and Nixon in the first televised presidential debate in 1960?

Hans Wegner. American journalists had singled the chair out at a Copenhagen exhibition in 1949, and in the United States it became known simply as 'The Chair'.

The white stackable Monobloc, described as the world's most common plastic chair, is made from what?

Polypropylene is injection-moulded into the Monobloc in a single shot; French engineer Henry Massonnet's Fauteuil 300 of 1972 is one claimed origin.

IKEA was founded in 1943 by which 17-year-old?

Ingvar Kamprad set IKEA up with money his father gave him for doing well at school, selling pens and wallets by mail order; furniture joined the range only in 1948.

The E and A in IKEA, founded by a Swede, stand for what?

The family farm and his home village: Elmtaryd, where the founder grew up, and nearby Agunnaryd. He was dyslexic and found names easier to remember than code numbers, which is why IKEA products have names.

According to IKEA's naming system, beds are named after places in which country?

Norway. Beds, wardrobes and hall furniture take Norwegian place names and coffee tables Swedish ones; in 2021 Sweden's tourist board answered with 'Discover the Originals', inviting visitors to the real places.

Which IKEA bookcase, launched in 1979, is so common that Bloomberg has tracked its price worldwide?

Billy. Designer Gillis Lundgren, IKEA's fourth employee, sketched it on the back of a napkin so that he wouldn't forget the idea.

The Oval Office's Resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria, was built from the timbers of what?

A British Arctic ship: HMS Resolute was abandoned in the ice in 1854, found by an American whaler and returned to Britain, and Victoria sent the desk to President Hayes in 1880.

The word 'sofa' goes back to the word 'suffa' in which language?

Arabic. In English 'sofa' first meant a raised, carpeted stretch of floor for sitting on; the upholstered seat took over the name later.

The upholstered footstool called a pouffe or hassock takes its more common name from what?

The Ottoman Empire lent its name: there the ottoman was a low cushioned platform running around the walls of a room, which Europe shrank, piece by piece, into a footstool.

Who reputedly commissioned the deep-buttoned leather sofa with arms and back the same height?

The 4th Earl of Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, is said to have ordered the first one; in Canada his title went on to become an everyday word for any couch.

In Italian, the word 'credenza' originally meant what?

Belief or trust, as in English 'credence': the name is said to have passed to the sideboard where a servant tasted a noble's food for poison before it was served.

'Chaise longue' is French for what?

Long chair: English speakers turned 'chaise longue' into 'chaise lounge' by folk etymology after the piece arrived from France around 1800.

Before it meant a piece of furniture, the word 'wardrobe' referred to what?

A room where garments were stored: the word joins Old French warder, 'to guard', and robe, and a king's Wardrobe grew from such a room into a whole department of his household.

In North American English a chest of drawers is commonly called what?

A dresser or bureau is the American name; in Britain 'dresser' first suggests a kitchen piece with open shelves for displaying plates, the Welsh dresser.

Which recliner company began with two cousins' wooden porch chair of 1928?

La-Z-Boy grew from the 1928 wood-slat reclining porch chair of cousins Edward Knabusch and Edwin Shoemaker in Monroe, Michigan; an upholstered version followed and a naming contest produced the brand.

Who is often wrongly credited with inventing the rocking chair?

It actually appeared in North America in the early 18th century when Franklin was a child; Thonet made the first bentwood rocker in 1860.

The Adirondack chair was invented between 1900 and 1903 by Thomas Lee in which US state?

Lee built it at Westport, New York, in the Adirondacks; his friend Harry Bunnell patented the design in 1905, and the familiar fan-shaped back arrived with Irving Wolpin's 1938 patent.

Which science-fiction author described waterbeds in three novels before Charles Hall built the modern one in 1968?

Robert A. Heinlein designed a waterbed while bedridden with tuberculosis in the 1930s and wrote it into three novels, but never built one; Charles Hall built the first modern waterbed in 1968.

In a traditional futon set, what are the shikibuton and the kakebuton?

A mattress and a duvet: the shikibuton is laid on the tatami and the kakebuton goes over the sleeper; both are folded away by day, unlike the Western fold-out frame that borrowed the name.

The Great Bed of Ware, an Elizabethan four-poster over three metres wide, drew visitors for centuries to what?

Coaching inns in the Hertfordshire town of Ware, a day's ride from London: guests carved their initials into its posts, and by 1601 it was famous enough for a joke in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

Gustav Stickley's plain, sturdy 'Mission' furniture made him a leading American voice of which design movement?

Arts and Crafts. Stickley spread the movement through his magazine The Craftsman, but American taste turned to revival styles and he filed for bankruptcy in 1915.

England's Coronation Chair was built around 1300 to enclose which stone beneath its seat?

The Stone of Scone. Edward I took it from Scotland in 1296; four students stole it back on Christmas Day 1950, and since 1996 it has lived in Scotland, returning only for coronations.

Folklore credits which US president with inventing the lazy Susan for his daughter?

Thomas Jefferson is the folklore inventor, supposedly for a daughter called Susan, but he had no such daughter; before the name caught on in the early 1900s such turntables were called dumbwaiters.

The Sacco, the original bean bag chair of 1968, came from three designers based where?

Italy. Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolini and Franco Teodoro filled an envelope with polystyrene pellets for the maker Zanotta, so the chair has no shape of its own until a sitter's body gives it one.

Which tall piece with a fall-front writing flap and bookcase above is also an escritoire?

A secretary. Its hinged flap drops to make a writing surface and lifts to shut the papers away, and the name goes back, like the office job, to the Latin for someone trusted with secrets.

Columbus's 1492 journal records the 'hamaca', a word Spanish borrowed from the language of which people?

Taíno. Columbus wrote that islanders paddled out to his ships in canoes to barter cotton and the nets they slept in, and Spanish passed their word hamaca on to English as 'hammock'.

Which Japanese-American sculptor designed the 1947 glass-topped coffee table with a two-piece wooden base?

Isamu Noguchi held that 'everything is sculpture', so his table is one curved wooden shape made twice and joined into a base for a heavy sheet of plate glass.

Bernard Castro's TV ads showed his four-year-old daughter opening what?

A convertible couch. Bernadette Castro was four when the 'Castro Convertible' commercials began, and she grew up to run the company her father had started in 1931 with $400.

The Wishbone Chair, a 1949 Danish design classic, is named after which feature?

Y-shaped back: the same feature gives it its other name, the Y Chair. The design borrows from classical Chinese chairs, and it has never been out of production since 1950.