Classic Hardwood

I have touched on some of these points previously, so I appologise for a little repetition, but I think this post reads better with it in.

Near its beginning, most high quality furniture was basic, often made out of solid pieces of wood. Although they were very decorative at times, they were fairly basic and didn’t possess the refinement of later centuries and designers.

It was during the 17th and 18th Centuries that furniture manufacture, as we know it today, came into its own. With the appearance of Thomas Chippendale furniture manufacture became more advanced in its design and implementation with finely finished joints and a carcass (body of the item of furniture) that was just as well made as the fascia.

As with a lot of things though, the unaffordable cost of high quality craftsmen meant that by the late 19th Century suppliers of furniture were looking at procedures that could help bring the price of manufacture down. This brought about the introduction of the initial types of machine made furniture.

A major change was to the drawers - a method known as pegged construction.

Early drawers were characterised by the deep sides which were usually grooved so that they could slide on bars or runners fixed to the sides of the carcass. They had to develop a lot as the items of furniture became more delicate and sophisticated. During the 17th Century the practice of just using simple pegs (see below) and runners all but disappeared. The replacements were slightly more refined, but still simple, runners that were placed underneath, rather than at the sides, of the drawers.

Up to the early 18th Century, furniture was assembled using a “pegged” or “jointed” technique using what was known as a mortise-and-tenon joint. Quite often they were held together just by wooden pegs or dowels and on very rare occasions, primitive nails.

The earliest forms of pegs were quite basic, and acted more like wedges and just tightened the joints they were hammered into.

Quite often, over time, these joints and pegs were pushed out of shape. This is an easy indicator of the age of a piece, and also how well cared for an item of wooden furniture is with the appearance of these joints.