Household Furnishing io6i 



been slighted or that the material is inferior to what might have been 

 used in a plain shape at the same price. 



No piece of furniture is stronger than its weakest joint. A chair may 

 have legs that are thick enough to be used as porch posts, but if the seat 

 and the legs are not united by sound joints the chair is inefficient and gives 

 the lie to its seeming strength. If one tries the experiment of joining a 

 horizontal and a vertical strip of wood securely at a single point he will 

 discover that this is well-nigh impossible. Bracing of some kind must 

 therefore be used. Drawer, slides, the arms and rungs of chairs, the 

 apron on a table, are in reality braces. 



Any variation in outline, or any decoration, should follow or fit the 

 structural shape. Gentle, restrained curves may be introduced to soften 

 the outline, and angular comers may be rounded, without impairing the 

 strength of the members. 



The structural shape of a chair takes its cue from the human body. 

 The back should tilt slightly backward and it is sometimes curved to fit 

 the spine. Low arms where the elbows naturally fall in place may be 

 curved or varied in shape to conform to the body. The general lines of 

 a chair should be less angular than those of other pieces of furniture. 

 The seat is usually made of some elastic material, such as rush, cane, 

 leather, or tapestry, unless, as in the case of dining-room chairs, the use 

 is for only a short period. 



Any well-constructed piece of furniture containing drawers is expensive 

 as compared with a piece having none. This is reasonable, as every 

 drawer is made up of at least five pieces of wood and requires a consider- 

 able amount of work. An attempt to economize on such a piece of fur- 

 niture, whether desk, bureau, or chiffonier, will prove unwise, as the drawers 

 in cheap furniture sag when opened and are likely to stick and to slide 

 in and out unevenly at the corners. 



Successive styles of furniture. — No one knew better than the colonial 

 folk the relation between structure and form. It is not because colonial 

 furniture is old that it is valuable, but because it is sound in workman- 

 ship, normal in form, and made of a kind of mahogany that is not on the 

 market to-day. The decoration applied by the colonial makers to their 

 furniture, whether carving, inlay, moldings, turnings, or decorative grain, 

 with few exceptions enhanced the effect and in no way distorted the natural 

 shape. Cherry and birch were used for legs and for uprights requiring 

 strength, mahogany being too brittle for this purpose. The fronts of 

 bureau drawers, the backs of davenports, and other parts showing beautiful 

 grain were merely veneered with a thin layer of mahogany glued to a 

 backing of soft wood. Wood veneer should not be looked on as a sham, 

 since it is used for the purpose of preventing large panels of wood from 



