country furniture
/country furniture in buildings at Frilandsmuseet - the open-air museum north of Copenhagen
In Denmark traditional country furniture is called bondemøbler or peasant furniture and in England this is called cottage or farmhouse furniture or by some academics vernacular furniture.
These are the chairs and tables and cupboards and beds made before the industrial revolution and before the retail revolution of the 19th century by families themselves or by local carpenters who would use local materials - so where possible oak or, as oak became less easily available and more expensive, then other local timber including ash or pine. The use of expensive foreign timber is rare in country furniture, for obvious reasons, and highly finished and polished surfaces or veneer were beyond the abilities of local makers unless they worked in a relatively large market town and had a large workshop and wood was left untreated or furniture was either finished with simple wax or oil, to protect the surfaces, or could be painted and decorated.
Upholstery was also an expensive job that required a specialist so seats were either simply flat wood planks or possibly wood hollowed out but rush and cane or even rope were used woven over a frame for chair seats. Simple seat cushions could be made from a tough fabric with a filling of straw or animal hair - using the same materials and techniques as making a mattress.
living in a single room - Den Gamle By - the open-air museum in Aarhus - note the bed in a drawer under the settle or bench
Wood for chair and table legs and for the spindles of a chair back or for stretchers between the legs - to make a stronger frame - could be turned on a simple lathe and in England these lathes were often set up out in beech woods and the finished turned legs and spindles were brought into town where the chairs would be assembled. Turning legs and spindles for furniture required the same tools and skills needed for making the spokes of wood wheels for carts and carriages. With turned legs and spindles fixing the parts together was also relatively simple with the end tapered and then pushed tightly into a drilled hole and that avoided having to cut complicated mortice-and-tenon joints that needed careful work with a saw and a chisel … work that was best done on a proper bench where the wood could be held securely in place.
Through into the 19th century - and even into the early 20th century - local blacksmiths could make hinges and catches and nails if they were needed for the wood furniture.
Wealthier farmers in a village or rural clergymen who wanted more elaborate furniture for their posher homes or for the church bought more sophisticated and expensive furniture from nearby towns or even from abroad and then the features and styles of those imported pieces might be copied or, at least, roughly imitated by local craftsmen.
These relatively simple and 'honest' country chairs … honest meaning straightforward and unpretentious … were and still are appreciated even in the town or city. In part, that was because they were easier to make and cheaper for workers to buy but, in the late 19th and early 20th century, people were moving into Copenhagen to work in the port and work in new industries and may well have brought furniture from where they had lived, out in the countryside or smaller towns, or they deliberately sought out furniture that reminded them of distant family or distant lives.
Unpretentious modesty and simple techniques, looked back to straightforward local carpentry, rather than to fancy foreign fashions, and that meant that people saw these well-made but basic and relatively light but strong chairs with turned legs and rush seats as appropriate for churches.
Good country furniture can be seen in appropriate room settings in the open air museums in Denmark and it is worth spending time looking at these pieces to see where modern designers have taken and adapted ideas but, even more interesting, to see types of furniture that are rarely made now such as the clothes press or plate rack or even the bed built into a cupboard or the large plank chests for storing bedding.
The influence of features that were taken from good country furniture can be seen in the sophisticated work of major designers of the modern period including the Nyborg Library Chairs by Hans Wegner, the 'People's Chair' by Børge Mogensen and, of course, in the Church Chair by Kaare Klint.