Earlywood: Four Kinds of Furniture

Publisher’s note: Good morning! Welcome to Earlywood, a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. This originally appeared in a blog post in 2012. Each Earlywood entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. We hope you enjoy it.

The act of naming something is, in my view, a kind of violence. But it also is a helpful form of shorthand.

With furniture, the most common way to name it is by its ornament (Chippendale, Arts & Crafts, Ikea). This name gives us a rough idea of what it looks like, perhaps when it was built and maybe even some of its construction details (mahogany, through-tenons, confirmat screws).

But what if the piece of furniture doesn’t really have much ornament? What if we are unsure when it was built? What if the piece appears in the furniture record made out of every conceivable hardwood and softwood?

What do we call this furniture? One term is “vernacular,” though that word casts a net that’s too wide. Verna…