|
|
Furniture While a softwood tree may be ready to be
felled after forty years of growth, an oak would not be sufficiently
mature for furniture until it had been growing for
at least a century. This slower rate of growth contributes to the
denser structure of hardwoods, the fibrous components of which consist
of long narrow cells with thick walls. These walls are impregnated
with lignin, which remains after the cells have died and which keeps
the cell shape rigid.
After felling and cutting at the sawmill, timber that is to be used
for construction or furniture must be seasoned, dried
and hardened to minimize movement. Freshly cut wood is thick with
sap and moisture. Today’s commercial wood is kiln-dried. In
past centuries timber was air-dried and left stacked under cover,
sometimes for years, before it was ready to be worked. .
Even the most thoroughly seasoned timber for furniture continues to move slightly
in reaction to atmospheric conditions, expanding with an increase
in moisture, contracting as it dries out. Various methods of minimizing
furniture warping have been devised over the centuries. Plywood, which sandwiches
three or more thin layers of wood with the grain running crosswise,
has been used in furniture since the eighteenth century
and was particularly popular with the nineteenth -century Biedermeier
furniture craftsmen of Austria and Germany long before modernists such as Alvar
Aalto and marcel Breuer made it their own. Pianos, from the late nineteenth
century onwards, were always made from laminated wood, which partly
explained their disproportionate weightiness. The solution for today’s
furniture has been MDF (medium density fibreboard), made by binding
the waste fibres of wood that are a by-product of processing at the
sawmill with glues, for a heavy, dense board with a fine surface suitable
for painting.
For some furniture, unseasoned ‘green’wood is chosen. Traditional
timber-framed buildings, which use mortise and tenon joints, secured
with wooden pegs, make structural allowance for gradual shrinkage.
While wood that has been nailed will split if it expands or contracts
too much, a mortise (or notch) with a tenon (on tongue of wood) Slotted
into it, fixed with apiece of wooden dowel, will move in unison without
putting any extra strain on the point of fixing.
Softwood furniture has traditionally been used for woodwork that was painted,
or for kitchen furniture. Pine was the wood most commonly used for
interiors. Being cheap and plentiful, it was a low-status wood, only
fit for servants or disguise. Stripped pine furniture – often marketed
as a part of the period-living package – was a late twentieth-century
fashion that would have been anathema to our Georgian and Victorian
ancestors. Pine panelling, doors, shutters and window surrounds were
always painted, sometimes grained to look like a more expensive wood.
Even pine kitchen dressers were usually painted. Only the kitchen
table top was left naked so it could be bleached and scrubbed.
Hardwood furniture especially those imported from exotic climes, were the
raw material of the fine cabinetmaker: mahogany, with its rich colouring;
rosewood with its prominent, wavering grain; dramatic Virginia walnut.
The patterns of grain were matched and maximized, and intricate marquetries
and inlays exploited different colours of wood to create designs of
remarkable variety. |
|
