Three batches, sixty stories
The Furniture Library grew in three groups of twenty. The first followed furniture through rooms and daily routines, including the Bureau du Roi and the desk reconstructed in full so a reader can see what the king actually sat at.
The second took on experiments: pieces that argued with the idea of furniture, among them Nanna Ditzel's upholstered landscapes and the Toio, a floor lamp built around a car headlight. The third moved into rooms and workshops, where furniture is made as much as it is used.
The Library now holds 241 articles.
What you can discover
Carlo Scarpa's Soriana and the partnership behind it. Carlo Mollino. Garrick's bed. The Total Furnishing Unit. The Bocca sofa. Serge Mouille's three-arm lamp. Polder. Traccia. The furniture of Chandigarh and of Les Arcs. Isokon.
Alongside them, quieter objects with just as much to say: how a tambour door rolls out of sight, a Salem worktable, the Hoosier cabinets that organised a kitchen before fitted kitchens existed, a British child's high chair, the Korean soban, the Sitzmaschine, Gallé's plant-inspired furniture and a Chinese table.
Pictures that explain, and say what they are
The new articles carry documentary photographs, drawn diagrams and editorial reconstructions. Where an image is a reconstruction rather than a photograph of the object, the article says so plainly — a diagram of how four tools do their work is useful, but only if the reader knows what they are looking at.
Sources, attribution and uncertain details stay visible, and an exact object is never quietly presented as a whole design or a furniture type.
Why we keep writing them
A marketplace for vintage furniture is only as good as its readers' eyes. Someone who knows why a drawer was built that way, or what a repair used to cost, buys better and keeps what they buy for longer.
The Library is free to read, has no products in it, and exists to make old furniture legible.