Furniture Trivia
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45 free Furniture trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Furniture trivia questions with answers. Furniture is the design history you sit on every day, and this quiz covers it from Neolithic stone dressers to flat-pack bookcases. It takes in Skara Brae and ancient Egypt, the Greek klismos, medieval oak, Louis XIV, XV and XVI, Thomas Chippendale's Director, Thonet's steam-bent No. 14 and its 50 million sales, Windsor and Shaker chairs, the Bauhaus and Marcel Breuer's Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair, the Eames lounge, Arne Jacobsen's Egg, Saarinen's Tulip, Eero Aarnio's Ball, Verner Panton's plastic S, Hans Wegner's 500 chairs, the Monobloc, and IKEA's founder, acronym, naming rules and Billy bookcase. It also explains where the words come from: sofa, ottoman, credenza, chaise longue, wardrobe and chesterfield, plus the stories behind the Murphy bed, the La-Z-Boy, the waterbed and the Adirondack chair. Easy questions ask what a wardrobe stores and which country IKEA comes from. Medium ones cover famous designers and their chairs. Hard ones want the number of pieces in a Thonet No. 14, the year of Chippendale's catalogue, the Bauhaus workshop Breuer ran and the opera-singer legend behind the fold-away bed. Every answer has been checked against reference articles on furniture history and individual pieces, and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 45 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Some of the oldest surviving furniture, stone dressers and beds from around 3000 BCE, was found where?
Skara Brae in Orkney
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.
Q 02The French and German words for furniture come from a Latin word meaning what?
Moveable goods
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.
Q 03The klismos, an elegant chair with a curved backrest, originated in which civilisation?
Ancient Greece
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.
Q 04Medieval furniture in northern Europe, such as heavy carved chests, was typically made of which wood?
Oak
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.
Q 05What was Thomas Chippendale's 1754 pattern book, the first comprehensive furniture catalogue, called?
The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director
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.
Q 06From 1672, André-Charles Boulle's tortoiseshell marquetry furnished Versailles for which French king?
Louis XIV
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.
Q 07Thonet's No. 14 'bistro chair' of 1859 is considered the world's first what?
Mass-produced item of furniture
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.
Q 08Michael Thonet made the No. 14 chair after Prince Metternich invited him to settle in which city?
Vienna
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.
Q 09What do the legs and back spindles of a Windsor chair all slot into?
A solid wooden seat
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.
Q 10Which celibate American sect made furniture so plain that it became a style?
The Shakers
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.
Q 11Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel Wassily chair was inspired by what?
A bicycle
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.
Q 12Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich designed the Barcelona chair for which country's pavilion at that city's 1929 exposition?
Germany
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.
Q 13The Eames Lounge Chair of 1956 was introduced by which American furniture company?
Herman Miller
Q 21According to IKEA's naming system, beds are named after places in which country?
Norway
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.
Q 22Which IKEA bookcase, launched in 1979, is so common that Bloomberg has tracked its price worldwide?
Billy
Billy. Designer Gillis Lundgren, IKEA's fourth employee, sketched it on the back of a napkin so that he wouldn't forget the idea.
Q 23The Oval Office's Resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria, was built from the timbers of what?
A British Arctic ship
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.
Q 14Arne Jacobsen designed the Egg chair for which building?
The SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen
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.
Q 15Eero Saarinen said he designed the Tulip chair to clear up 'the slum of' what?
Legs
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.
Q 16Eero Aarnio's 1963 Ball Chair, a hollow sphere you sit inside, is a design classic from which country?
Finland
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.
Q 17Which Danish designer's Round Chair seated both Kennedy and Nixon in the first televised presidential debate in 1960?
Hans Wegner
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'.
Q 18The white stackable Monobloc, described as the world's most common plastic chair, is made from what?
Polypropylene
Polypropylene is injection-moulded into the Monobloc in a single shot; French engineer Henry Massonnet's Fauteuil 300 of 1972 is one claimed origin.
Q 19IKEA was founded in 1943 by which 17-year-old?
Ingvar Kamprad
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.
Q 20The E and A in IKEA, founded by a Swede, stand for what?
The family farm and his home village
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.
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.
Q 24The word 'sofa' goes back to the word 'suffa' in which language?
Arabic
Arabic. In English 'sofa' first meant a raised, carpeted stretch of floor for sitting on; the upholstered seat took over the name later.
Q 25The upholstered footstool called a pouffe or hassock takes its more common name from what?
The Ottoman Empire
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.
Q 26Who reputedly commissioned the deep-buttoned leather sofa with arms and back the same height?
The 4th Earl of Chesterfield
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.
Q 27In Italian, the word 'credenza' originally meant what?
Belief or trust
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.
Q 28'Chaise longue' is French for what?
Long chair
Long chair: English speakers turned 'chaise longue' into 'chaise lounge' by folk etymology after the piece arrived from France around 1800.
Q 29Before it meant a piece of furniture, the word 'wardrobe' referred to what?
A room where garments were stored
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.
Q 30In North American English a chest of drawers is commonly called what?
A dresser or bureau
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.