How Low Can You Go

QUESTION: I just purchased an antique coffee table and would like to know more about it. What can you tell me about my table? Is it a valuable antique?

ANSWER: I hate to burst your bubble, but your table isn’t an antique. In fact, coffee tables are a modern invention. No one knows exactly where they came from or who designed the first one.

The current definition a coffee table is a low, wide table placed in front of a couch or sofa to receive drinks, TV remotes, magazines, ashtrays, and miscellaneous other items, including feet. Yes, some people do prop their tired feet up once in a while. But a quick look back in time doesn't show many similar tables in our Western history. Old photos of late Victorian room settings show taller tables, often placed behind a sofa to receive cups and glasses when not in use. The only other table offering close to the service of a coffee table was the parlor table, often placed in the middle of the room with a gas lamp on it. Here, the lady of the house could serve coffee or tea to guests.



During the latter half of the 19th century, wealthy people became interested in the exotic furniture of Turkey. They would set up a special corner or an entire room using pillowed benches and ornately carved, low, round tables from which they drank strong Turkish coffee and tea.

Americans became especially fond of Japanese design after the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. They particularly liked the idea of sitting on pillows on the floor and eating at low tables like the Japanese do. When the Aesthetic Movement took hold in the 1880s, furniture designers blended Eastlake and Renaissance Revival styles with Turkish and Asian ones.

While some sources note the production of low tables in various Revival styles during the last decade of the 1800s, no one has ever seen any.

The coffee table appeared in the 20th century, most likely in the 1920s and 1930s. As Americans began to purchase parlor sets, consisting of perhaps a couch, two chairs, and several small tables, the coffee table idea became more popular.

In 1903, F. Stuart Foote founded the Imperial Furniture Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He had learned the furniture business from his father, E. H. Foote, who had founded the Grand Rapids Chair Company in 1872. Foote claimed to have invented the coffee table himself while helping his wife prepare for a party. He simply lowered the legs on an existing table, and a new type of furniture came into being. Unfortunately, so far this hasn’t been proven.

Prohibition may have also played a role in the development of the coffee table. From 1920 to 1933, America was legally "dry." That led to a shortage of well blended, smooth tasting liquor. “Bathtub gin" and "white lightning" to the place of traditional spirits but both had quite a kick.  To soften that kick, people began mixing fruit juices and other beverages with the hootch which eventually led to the invention of the "cocktail."



During Prohibition, people often used this low table to serve coffee to their guests. But with the repeal of the law, they could once again legally serve cocktails, so it became known as a “cocktail table.” Sales for these low tables soared even during the Depression.

To make them seem older than they were and thus more elegant, many furniture manufacturers began producing their coffee/cocktail tables using stylized designs of the past. This was a direct result of the appearance of the Colonial Revival style of the early 20th century which encouraged furniture makers to create pieces in supposedly “colonial” styles. All of a sudden coffee tables appeared in the Queen Anne, Chippendale, Federal, and even Jacobean styles. Thus, many people today are fooled into thinking that their coffee tables are really antiques.

The only way to have a truly antique coffee table is to cut down an existing antique table as F. Stuart Foote did in 1903. And while your coffee table will be a true antique, it won’t be worth very much.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the other 17,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac.











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Far East Fakes

QUESTION: I recently purchased a secretary. From my research online, I think it’s done in the Napoleonic Egyptian Revival style. The piece isn’t in great shape, but I would like to know how to determine if it’s a reproduction or is, indeed, an antique, and if so, how old is it?

ANSWER: At first glance your piece looks like an elegant secrétaire à abattant or a drop-front desk from the French Empire Period. But upon closer inspection, you should notice certain discrepancies. While it may look like a piece from the early 19th century, it isn’t a reproduction, but a poorly made facsimile. That’s not a fake, but a piece of furniture made to simulate a particular style.

Since the 1990s, there’s been a flood of “antique” furniture coming into the U.S. from Indonesia. While high-end antique dealers and experts can tell immediately that it’s not authentic, the typical antique dealer can’t. A high-end dealer sells quality and provenance at up-scale shows while most shop dealers are just interested in selling to make a fast buck.

So what makes this drop-front desk a possible candidate for Indonesian facsimile antique furniture? There are three construction clues that even a novice antiques collector can use to identify Indonesian facsimiles: First, Indonesian furniture makers use  a single species of wood  throughout. Second, they hot-glue many of the joints. And third, they use common nails—both finishing and flathead.

Since there are few legal restrictions on how furniture makers can market or advertise wood,  trade names have been developed to help promote little known wood or to make common woods sound more valuable.

The wood in Indonesian reproduction furniture, for example, comes from the groups Shorea, Parashorea, and Pentacme which grow in Asia and aren’t true mahogany. However, all of them can be legally advertised and sold as "mahogany." Two other generic trade names for these woods are Philippine mahogany and Lauan mahogany. The genuine mahogany used in fine antique furniture comes from a different group called Swietenia, originating in Central and South America, Cuba, Honduras, and the West Indies.

So why do Indonesian furniture makers use only one type of wood? The answer is simple. Since they’re using a lesser quality wood, they can afford to use it for an entire piece. Cabinetmakers of the 18th and early 19th century used expensive mahogany on the outside of a piece of furniture where it would be seen and lesser quality woods on the inside out of sight. It would have been impractical for a cabinetmaker back then to use mahogany for a glue block, for example, when no one would ever see it.

Another reason to use more than one type of wood was weight. Larger pieces of 18th and 19th-century furniture would have been too heavy if cabinetmakers used mahogany for entire pieces. Indonesian facsimiles are actually heavier than authentic antiques because they use dense Philippine mahogany.

Cabinetmakers of the 18th and early 19th century used dowels, splines, or special cuts, such as mortise and tenon, to join pieces of wood. They didn’t use nails because they cost more and didn’t hold the joints as well. And they didn’t use screws because they didn’t exist at that time. Indonesian furniture makers tend to use hot glue or common nails to join wood. Hot-glued joints tend to split with shrinkage. Plus the hot glue will fluoresce under black light.

Countersunk finishing nails are commonly used on Indonesian facsimiles. In fact, makers often use wider, filled in countersunk holes to simulate the effect of using wooden pegs.

Now let’s take a look at the details on this drop-front desk to see why it isn’t a real antique. Mahogany veneer has been applied to all the outside surfaces. However, the drawers don’t seem to be veneered but are made of solid pieces. And all the parts of the drawers seem to be made of the same Philippine mahogany wood. Because the wood isn’t real mahogany, it doesn’t have the beautiful grain pattern of the real thing. Also, the grain on the drop-front is horizontal but the grain on the drawers, like the sides, is vertical. Certainly all the grain on the front should be going in the same direction.

The brass fittings or ormulu are very poorly cast and finished. The escutcheons—keyhole surrounds—seem to be nailed rather than screwed into place. The brass fittings are of several different styles0—Baroque, neoclassical anthemium combinations, and egg and dart molding. The masks look more Phoenician or Egyptian, as do the heavy drawer pulls. The plaque in the center of the drop front is “Autumn” from the four-seasons series produced in bisque by Royal Copenhagen, but, it too, is poorly cast. The bows with streaming tails are the Baroque-style decorations. The overall effect tries to be elegant, but individually the decorations don’t go together.

Much of this type of furniture has surfaced in the American antiques market. Some unscrupulous dealers, knowing that their clientele wouldn’t know the difference, have imported it to sell in their shops. Other pieces have been bought and sold several times in the last 20 years and have successfully become part of the overall antiques market inventory. Sometimes one of these facsimiles will even make it to an antique show because the dealer hasn’t done any research or ignores the lack of provenance. In this case, the dealer will sell if for less, but still make a profit on the unsuspecting buyer.

Asleep in Luxury

QUESTION: My mother-in-law, who is 97, has just moved into a retirement home. Her Aunt Margaret was married to Charles Tuckett, the son of Charles Elias Tuckett, founder of Tuckett Tobacco and one time mayor of Hamilton, Ontario. Charles inherited the original Tuckett Estate and when he passed away Margaret was left owning it. Charles and Margaret had one child but the child died. When Margaret died her family inherited the estate. My mother-in-law inherited a lot of the furniture, but I haven’t found  much help regarding the manufacturer and value. Can you help me?

ANSWER: Your mother-in-law now owns two fine pieces of
furniture. Not only are they of massive scale, but the carving on them looks to be made by hand, something that wasn’t common in the late 19th century when most factories made manufactured most furniture.

These two pieces together make up a ‘bedchamber suite,” a more formal version of bedroom suite. Earlier suites consisted of just two pieces—a bed, commonly referred to as a “bedstead” and a dressing case, what most people call a dresser. Both came in all shapes and sizes and in one of seven different major revival styles. This suite is a fine example of the massive Renaissance Revival style, preferred by wealthy Americans. Later on, a second type of suite appeared, one with a bedstead, washstand, and bureau. These were smaller in scale—ideal for middle class homes and Victorian cottages—and less ornate and expensive than their bigger cousins. The concept of selling furniture “en suite” was novel in the 1880s and 1890s. Today, we this for granted.

Not only did the size show off the wealth of the suite’s owners, it also fit the enormous rooms with 12-foot high ceilings common in Victorian Italianate mansions of the time.

Suites with dressing cases from the Victorian period were more expensive than the bureau type, and more elegant as well. Sometimes their tall mirrors seemed to extend from floor to ceiling and had ornately carved frames that featured small bracket shelves for candle-holders or small lamps. Drawers varied in number and size. What people now describe as a well or step-down generally separated the parallel series of drawers. Cabinetmakers treated all three levels alike, topping them with either wood or marble. Some pieces had full-width drawers at the bottom of the well. Sometimes, the mid-section below the looking glass reached down to the floor, but this wasn’t common. To achieve individuality, customers could order their own mirror frame, and select from 16 different carved drawer pulls.

In the 19th century, the word "toilet" referred to personal grooming, thus a mirror became a  toilet or plate. An oval "plate" is now called a wishbone mirror, since the frame in which it is suspended is shaped roughly like a fowl's wishbone.

During the 1870s, people referred to the two small drawers that sit across from each other on the top of a bureau as decks. Today, they’ve become known as handkerchief boxes. Much less common were the petite boxes with hinged lift lids that sat on top of the dresser.

A projection front refers to the part of a dresser that hangs out over the base. A drawer or two may project or overhang the others. Slipper drawers had no handles and appeared to be the apron on a dresser. Not surprisingly, owners stored their slippers in them. Some dressers even had hidden compartments for jewelry.

This particular dressing case has all the features of the American Renaissance Revival style and then some. Not only does it have the small drawers, but also smaller cabinets with carved fronts with what look to be magnolia flowers. How magnolia flowers got to be on a piece of furniture made in Canada is a mystery. Burl walnut veneer decorates the fronts of the larger panels. And both the dresser case and the bedstead feature a large carved medallion with a dove of peace.

It’s believed that this bedchamber suite was originally in The Towers, an Italianate mansion built by George Elias in the 1870s, the second manion on his property. Today, renamed The Scottish Rite, it’s the home of a Masonic Lodge. When George Elias had The Towers built, he commissioned a local cabinetmaker, Joseph Hoodless, to not only create the mansion’s fine woodwork, but also some custom pieces of furniture, including this bedchamber suite. At the time, Hoodless had the reputation of being the finest furniture maker of his time. One of his bedchamber suites won gold metal at the Toronto Exhibition.

Because this is so customized a piece, value is hard to determine. Similar bedchamber suites have sold for upwards of $10,000 or more.

To learn more about Victorian Revival furniture, read "The Victorian Era---An Age of Revivals."

Leave it to the Romans

QUESTION: My father has been trying to find out information about an old wooden armchair that he has that bears a label that reads “Hartwig &Kemper, Baltimore.” He could use some assistance on what it exactly is and the manufacturer. Could you possibly give us some information about this chair?

ANSWER: Your chair is what’s known as a Roman chair and dates from around 1870 to 1880. It’s done in the Victorian Neoclassical Revival style, a substyle of Renaissance Revival. But the origins of this chair go far back in time.

It’s ancient ancestor was the curule chair or sella curulis, from the Latin currus, meaning chariot. In the Roman Empire, only the highest government dignitaries, from the Emperor on down, were entitled to sit on it. It began as a folding campstool with curved legs. Ordinarily made of ivory, with or without arms, it became a seat of judgment. Subsequently it became a sign of office of all higher “curule” magistrates, or officials. According to Livy the curule seat, like the Roman toga, originated in Etruria.

Although often of luxurious construction, the curule chair was meant to be uncomfortable to sit on for long periods, since the Roman public expected their officials to carry out their duties in an efficient and timely manner. Also, its uncomfortability showed that the office held by the magistrate was only temporary, so he shouldn’t get too comfortable.

During the 15th century, both the Italians and the Spanish made chairs with cross-framed legs, joined by wooden stretchers that rested on the floor. A wooden back made the chair more rigid. Dealers in antiquities in the 19th-century called them "Savonarola Chairs." 

By the 1860s, the original curule chair form changed once again. Although some chair makers continued to use the cross-legged design, others modified it so that the legs splayed outward from a rectangular seat while the back had upright spindles and low-relief carving.

Hartwig & Kemper was a well-known furniture manufacturing company in Baltimore, with an office and salesroom at 316-318 W. Pratt Street and a factory at 309-331 W. King Street. The company also had numerous warehouses in the city and stocked a wide variety of furniture, especially chairs and tables, most of which they made of golden oak. Their 1904-05 catalog featured over 300 different pieces of furniture, mostly chairs, settees, couches, and tables. But they were mostly known for their chairs, which they produced in every style and type imaginable.

Your chair, however, was an earlier model made of tiger oak, a variation of golden oak that was dark-stained to look like mahogany. It features the stylized heads of two lions, with their mouths wide open to facilitate lifting the chair, on the top of the back. Your chair is called an elbow chair, presumably because a person could rest their elbows on the arms.

Furniture manufacturers like Hartwig and Kemper interpreted the prevailing furniture styles following the Civil War in homely, machine-made versions as well as more luxurious models.

Victorian furniture offered a mix of styles, almost all revivals of former styles. The Renaissance Revival style, one of four major Victorian revival styles, included such substyles as neoclassic Roman and Greek Revival. The word Renaissance in this case covered just about everything. The result was a stylized mix of many ancient and classic styles.

The end of the Civil War saw an immense trade in relatively inexpensive furniture to meet the demand of the market. Steam-powered machines simplified the manufacture of inexpensive furniture for the mass market. Furniture produced had simple lines, relatively flat surfaces, and a minimum of detailed carving.

Although factories in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania produced the greatest amount of furniture of all types. All made stock-in-trade furniture for the mass market. Golden or “antique” oak was the wood of choice. Some furniture companies just made chairs—straight-back chairs, dining chairs, rocking chairs.

Equipment they used was efficient enough that one reviewer said they could almost throw whole trees into the hopper and grind out chairs ready for use. However, early machines didn’t do such a great job with the finishing work. Any chairs with even a little carving had to be hand finished, a job entrusted to craftsmen brought from Europe. Sometimes, factory owners would use women and children to cover chair seats for very low wages.

The buying public at the time seriously considered price as well as style and comfort. By the end of the 1860s, Hartwig and Kemper were turning out large quantities of furniture, especially chairs.

Neither Royal nor Legal

QUESTION: I’m interested in buying a court cabinet which has lovely carvings and was bought as an antique, but the owner says it’s made of “pitch pine.” I've Googled this and have discovered it's a North American conifer. I've seen an almost identical cabinet advertised as being from the time of Henry II. It’s made from walnut and has slightly more detailed carvings, although the hardware looks identical. I wondered whether the pitch pine cabinet might be a later copy, perhaps still antique, but maybe a Victorian reproduction. The cabinets started out at the same price, but the pitch pine one has been discounted and is now about two-thirds the cost of the walnut one. Is the walnut one more valuable simply because of the quality of the timber?

ANSWER: Whew, that’s a lot of questions. So let’s take them one at a time. Before we start, it’s important to clarify just what a court cabinet is.

According to its antique definition, a court cabinet, more commonly referred to as a court cupboard, is an English sideboard that was fashionable from 1550 to 1675, that has three open tiers, the middle of which sometimes has a small closed cabinet with oblique sides. The word "court" is the French word for "short" and has nothing to do with the royal household.

People used these cupboards to display pewter and silver items. In Elizabethan and Jacobean households, the court cupboard was one of the three most important pieces of furniture—the others were the tester bed and the great chair. It usually sat on the dias, the highest area of the hall, which was the main room in a Tudor house. As with later sideboards, they also held cups and glasses, spoons (forks weren’t used back then), a sugar box, and containers for vinegar, oil, and mustard.

Besides holding items used in serving and eating meals, the court cupboard served as a display cabinet for the owner’s wealth. Back then there weren’t any banks or stock exchanges, so wealthy persons put their money into pewter, silver, and gold vessels. Not only did these plates and cups make their wealth usable and socially visible, they could be reconverted into coins should the need arise.

The two or three open shelves of the court cupboard were for the display of cups. Owners of these early cupboards often covered the shelves with a “cupboard cloth” to enhance the display of their valuable wares. The court cupboard showed off the prosperity and status of the owner of the house. It’s no wonder that they were such impressive and beautifully decorated pieces of furniture.

There were two forms of court cupboard—one in which the shelves were open, the other with one shelf, usually the upper, enclosed. Decorative arts professionals sometimes call the latter one a “standing livery cupboard,” believing that the owner used the enclosed portion to store and serve food and drink, also formerly known as "livery." The enclosed portion is usually set back a few inches from the front, and may be either straight-fronted or canted, in which case the central door is parallel to the front, and the two sides slant backwards. The early canted cupboards retain the carved supports in their front corners, later ones replace them with a turned drop-finial hanging from the top corners.

Cabinetmakers decorated the cupboard’s front and door with carved motifs and figures, but sometimes to make them extra luxurious, they inlaid them with light-colored holly wood and darker, almost black, bog oak in geometric, architectural or floral designs.

When the Pilgrims came to America in the first half of the 17th century, court cupboard were all the rage back home. After much struggling, they finally were able to sustain a colony on the shores of what’s today Cape Cod. But it wasn’t until a more robust colony came into being on the site of present-day Boston that people turned to local cabinetmakers for their furniture needs. This is where the pitch pine comes in.

Pitch pine can be found along the northeast coast of the United States from Maine to New Jersey, including all of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and inland across Pennsylvania to southern Ohio, and south through western Maryland, all of West Virginia, western Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee.

New England cabinetmakers used better woods, such as walnut, for their more expensive pieces. Court cupboards appeared in both types of wood, often with exactly the same carvings. The difference was that they often painted the pine cupboards in red and black to make them look better than they were.

The two court cupboards in question, however, are not as old as you might think. Both are what’s known as Jacobean or Tudor Revival pieces, dating from the last quarter of the 19th century. They’re a prime example of the use of the same carving style and design that cabinetmakers employed in order to produce pieces at different prices. And while they look identical, the walnut one will appreciate in value more than the pine one.

9 Ways to Help Identify Antique Furniture

QUESTION: Some friends of my mom’s gave me what looks like a Chippendale desk. They didn’t know anything about it, so I’ve had to do some research on my own. The only problem is that I can’t seem to find out much about it. Can you please help me out?

ANSWER: Not only will I try to tell you something about your desk, I’d like to give you and others some tips on what to look for when trying to identify antique furniture.

First and foremost, you need to determine if the piece you have is really an authentic antique or whether it’s a reproduction, a revival piece, a fake, or just a piece of junk. The key to the history of valuable antiques is whether they have a provenance—a history of ownership. This document lists the maker, all the owners to the present, and whether any repairs have been done to it. If you were spending five or six figures for a piece of furniture, you certainly would want to know everything you can about it.

But what about everyday pieces that don’t come with a provenance. Identifying them is a bit more difficult. Follow these steps and you should be able to determine quite a bit about any older piece of furniture that you have.

1. Determine the style. Using photographs in antiques books and photos online, try to determine the style of your piece. Certain styles, such as Chippendale, have telltale features, such as ball-and-claw feet, that help to identify them.

2. If it’s not authentic, determine if your piece is a revival or a reproduction. The difference between a revival and a reproduction is quite simple. The first is stylized version of the original style. So Colonial Revival furniture represents stylized versions of true 18th-century American Colonial pieces. A reproduction, on the other hand, is an exact replica of the original, often made of the same type of wood, using the same woodworking techniques.

3. Determine its age. Check to see if it has any nails or screws. An original Chippendale desk would have been assembled with pegs and mortar and tenon joints. Does it have any manufacturers labels anywhere? If so, then it’s definitely a Colonial Revival piece or even a fine reproduction from the mid-20th century.

4. Check any drawers for dovetailing. You can usually tell if the dovetails are handmade or done by machine. Those done by machine are very regular and even and can usually be found on pieces after about 1870.

5. Look inside the drawers or pullouts and see if the maker used the same wood—for example, mahogany. Later versions will have used some sort of fruitwood---pear, apple, or even poplar---for the drawer backs and sides. If its an older piece, the drawer bottoms will be made of a thinner version of the same wood.

6. Does the piece have decoration that isn’t in keeping with its style? Look at the detailing on your piece of furniture. Does it have added knobs or edging that doesn’t seem to go with the style of the piece. Often one of the owners of the piece may have added these to make it more up to date. The opposite also applies. Can you tell if any details have been removed for the sake of updating?.

7. Have any repairs been made to the piece? Look for signs of glue, nails, or screws that seem newer than the piece, itself. Also look for replaced wood panels, veneer, or detailing, such as finials.

8. Has the hardware been replaced or is it original? You can usually tell if hardware has been replaced. For instance, you’ll often see chests of drawers sporting glass or brass knobs. Originally, these chests usually had wooden knobs, but antique dealers, in an effort to make them more attractive to decorators, replace the original knobs with glass or brass ones. It’s actually better to replace missing original knob with a reproduction rather than replace the entire set with hardware that wouldn’t have been originally on the piece.

9. Were you told anything it about it? Did the seller or the person who gave you the piece tell you anything about its past? Did you ask them?

By studying the closeup photos that accompany this blog, you’ll notice the following about this desk.

First, your desk is definitely from the late 19th century---I’d say probably the 1880s, based on the 1886 mark you found. Second, the dovetails are definitely 19th century. But the real signs are the nails or screws that appear in one of the photos and the rather poor craftsmanship of the carving and joining. In an authentic Chippendale, the wood would be perfectly matched---the top of the leg where it joins the desk is a good example. Also, the stain would be even. I believe this piece had been refinished at some point, and not very well. I can tell that from the molding closeup from the front rim of the desk. And the last sign is the carving, itself. The little stars were stamped in. No 18th-century craftsman would have ever done that.

When asking someone to help you identify a piece, it helps if you take closeup photos of certain parts of the piece—hardware, dovetails, inside of drawers, carving, repairs, even the back.

A Furniture Re-Awakening

QUESTION: I recently purchased a mirror from an antique store in Thomasville, Georgia. The shop owner said the piece belonged to her grandfather, and she thinks the mirror dates back to the 1870's. I bought the mirror because I love the ornate carving on the frame. I'm also curious about the two round "stands" on the sides. Did people place candles on those platforms? What style do you think the mirror is? My best guess is Renaissance Revival.

ANSWER: You’re exactly right. Your mirror is in the Renaissance Revival style that was popular from 1855 to 1875. One of seven different revival styles prevalent during the Victorian Era, Renaissance Revival was an architectural style that easily made the transition from the custom, one-of-a-kind furniture shops in New York and Philadelphia to the mass-production factories of the Midwest.

Introduced in the early 1850's as a counter balance to the flowery Rococo Revival, Renaissance Revival borrowed elements from just about every furniture period since the 1400's. Originating in the French court of Napoleon III, the style soon took on a life of its own.

Furniture makers built pieces that consisted of an eclectic mix of 14th-century Renaissance, Neoclassical and 16th-century French derivation, based on a rectangular form with various embellishments.

While pieces of this style of furniture came in a myriad of shapes and sizes, they generally featured turned and fluted legs, raised or inset burled panels, heavily carved finials and crests, inset marble tops, and cookie-cut corners. On many mass-produced pieces, manufacturers added black and gold incising dn banding, and on finer, one-of-a-kind models, marquetry inlay and bronze or brass mounts. Most pieces of Renaissance Revival furniture were very large—ideal for the Victorian "more is more" philosophy. Makers of finer pieces preferred to use walnut, as it had been in the 16th century. And that was the most accurate thing about this revival style, which also borrowed heavily from the 17th-century Baroque and the earlier Gothic periods.

Prominent Renaissance and Neoclassical motifs such as columns, pediments, cartouches, rosettes, and carved masks, as well as plaques in porcelain, bronze, and mother-of-pearl became common types of decoration. Factory pieces had turned or cutout parts while finer examples featured carving or elaborate inlay of ebony and other exotic woods.

Before 1870 nearly all fine Renaissance Revival furniture came from small cabinetmaker shops in the East that made pieces to order. As the style gained popularity, furniture factories in the Midwest figured out how to mass produce the style for the Middle Class market. While some still used walnut, many chose to use cheaper ash or pine, painting it to look more high-style. The Renaissance Revival styles of the 1860s and 1870s marked the first time furniture makers used fine designs for mass-produced furnishings.

Large Midwestern factories, centered primarily in Grand Rapids, Michigan, manufactured pieces with turned and cut elements that could be produced more readily in volume and at lower cost. A few of the larger companies in Grand Rapids had committed to using the latest technology by the 1870's, among them Berkey & Gay, Nelson Matter and Phoenix. Renaissance Revival became the style of the Centennial Exposition and Grand Rapids was the star, but by that time it was already on its way out. The overpowering bedroom sets presented by Berkey & Gay cemented the reputation of the Grand Rapids factories as the manufacturers of bedroom sets or "chamber suites" as they became known.

New York cabinetmakers, such as Herter Brothers, on the other hand, produced pieces with elegant detail and elaborate inlays. They interpreted 16th- and 17th-century designs. And their motifs ranged from curvilinear and florid early in the period to angular and almost severe by the end of the period. Walnut veneer panels were a real favorite in their 1870s designs. Upholstery, usually of a more generous nature, was also often incorporated into this design style. Ornamentation and high relief carving included flowers, fruits, game, classical busts, acanthus scrolls, strapwork, tassels and masks. Architectural motifs, such as pilasters, columns, pediments, balusters and brackets, were another prominent design feature. Makers usually employed cabriole or substantially turned legs on their pieces.

The inevitable end came when the public desired to return to simplicity, the antithesis of Renaissance Revival, which embodied itself in the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th century and the resurgence of interest in American heritage which presaged the coming, and long running, Colonial Revival period.

Renaissance Revival furniture, while not the most favored by many of today's collectors because of its size and obvious statement, nevertheless played a pivotal role in American furniture history.