Furniture Design Styles – Book Recommendation
Hello All,
I’m new to the forum and unlimited membership but a long time subscriber to the print magazine. I was speaking to a fellow woodworker the other day who is designing a new coffee table for his wife and we were talking over the different “traditional” design styles: Shaker, arts and crafts, mid-century modern, etc.. While I’m familiar enough with the basics to be able to identify them in furniture I see… I realized – as I was trying to explain them – that I am not very well versed in their textbook definitions/differences.
Can anyone recommend a good book (or FWW article) that talks about the different design styles as a comparison against one another. I envisioned something similar to Christopher Schwarz workbench book where he talks through the different designs in the same book. I’d settle for a couple recommendations that dive into a specific style in depth… I was just hoping to get a “survey” of sorts and save some time!
Replies
FWW's book "Building Furniture" covers basic design styles of many common items. But it's by no means comprehensive.
There are several Graham Blackburn articles in the FWW website that look at design styles. But again, they can't be comprehensive about such a vast range of styles as are within the various Western WW traditions - never mind those of The Far East and elsewhere.
Ernest Joyce "The Techniques of Furniture Making" has a chapter on design styles. There's a whole book covering "C20th Furniture" by Fiona & Keith Baker. But the same problem remains - no single chapter or volume can possibly cover the whole of furniture design styles unless it's 10,000 pages long. All you'll see in the above are a tiny few examples.
Over the years I've collected dozens of books portraying and discussing various furniture styles in which I'm interested. They still cover only a very small proportion of all the furniture styles that there are, even in The Western traditions.
But perhaps someone has made an encyclopedia of furniture styles, which can be obtained at one volume a month for the next 36 months via "our easy payment plan"? It'll still miss something, I bet. :-)
Lataxe
PS
Try this 21 pages of "style" & "design" search results in FWW website. It includes various summaries of various design styles such as:
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2003/04/01/quintessential-arts-and-crafts
and
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2012/09/27/the-classic-shaker-style
But also a few overviews such as:
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2005/11/01/a-short-history-of-styles-and-forms
and
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2005/09/15/a-short-history-of-furniture-periods
There's also FWW Design Books 6, 7 & 8 although they may be out of print and they tend to have all sorts of strange very modern stuff n them.
Lataxe,
I realize this is a pretty big topic which is exactly why I was hoping there was some kind of primer out there for the simpletons like me. Regardless, thank you for your recommendations, you'll keep me busy for a while reading through these!
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