Not Obsolete: Five (Plus Two) Ever-Popular Furnishings for Rustic Retreats
We recently came across a blog post listing ten furniture pieces that, in the opinion of the author, are becoming extinct in the wake of modern lifestyles, technologies and tastes – including TV cabinets, roll-top desks, and water beds.
This spurred our thinking about how furniture changes with the times – not just the era-specific styles (e.g., ornate Louis XIV or spare mid-century modern) reflected in furniture design, but also the actual pieces of furniture that in some time periods are more central to daily life than in others. Curio cabinets and ferneries were particularly well-suited to Victorian hobbies and décor, whereas sectional sofas and mudroom storage cubbies are popular today.
Much of the antique furniture we sell, however, is placed in rustic retreats where families consciously lead a more relaxed and simpler lifestyle that provides a respite from the normal bustle and patterns of modern everyday life.
So along with rustic versions of the basics that are desirable furnishings in any modern home – dining tables and chairs, upholstered chairs, rocking chairs, sofas, console tables, lamps, mirrors and the like – rustic homes often include types of furniture that harken back to earlier eras. Here are five such pieces that prove to be ever-popular for rustic retreats:
1. Game tables. Card games and jigsaw puzzles typically happen during leisure hours with family members of all ages. There is not always room in our primary homes to dedicate a table surface to a jigsaw puzzle in progress, but having a table that is always available for and well suited to holding puzzles, board games and card games is a priority in many vacation retreats.
2. Porch gliders. Nothing quite evokes an idyllic rustic lifestyle like whiling away an evening gently gliding to and fro on a porch with a view of nature. Rustic gliders, especially versions with seat springs and cushions, are sometimes used as indoor sofas as well.
3. Coat trees. In more formal homes, outdoor coats typically reside in a hall closet. But free-standing coat trees, developed when houses did not have commodious closets, get a lot of use in rustic homes – in bedrooms for a favorite flannel shirt and wool sweater, in bathrooms for towels and robes, and near doors for sunhats and fishing caps, binoculars and creels, jackets and rain slickers.
4. Chaise lounges. A relaxing pose for reading is keeping the upper body upright with legs and feet stretched out and supported off the floor. An old-style chaise accommodates this position while taking up less room than a standard or sectional sofa, and also looks chic when not in use in a sitting room, bedroom, or on a porch.
5. Double beds. Modern couples are accustomed to sleeping in queen or king-sized beds, but there are no antique versions of those sizes. So devotees of period rustic style will often opt to have some double beds with unique and appealing designs in their home. Many also find that double beds can be more useful than at first assumed. Some of our customers have put pairs of double beds rather than twin beds in a room for two, as well as using them singly for a teenager's bedroom or for a cozy guest room. We recently delivered beds to a vacation home and placed them in a room the owners call “the orphanage” – a third floor space filled with twin and double beds that provide flexible overflow accommodations for legions of guests and family members throughout the summer.
Plus Two
These final two selections are not uncommon in everyday homes, but they are on the endangered list. Yet we predict that both will always be useful in rustic retreats.
1. Magazine holders. With so many online articles to read and images to browse, we don’t keep as many magazines around the house as we once did. Being less plugged in at a rustic home, however, leaves time to linger on a porch and flip through old copies of National Geographic or become absorbed in a long essay in The Atlantic. Handsome rustic magazine holders keep reading material at hand to fuel those moments of low-tech escape.
2. Log holders. Propane and natural gas fireplaces are rapidly replacing wood-burning fireplaces in urban apartments and suburban houses. But it is unlikely that these will become the norm in rustic homes. Hauling wood in and ashes out, smelling wood smoke, and watching flames wax and wane over real logs are valued components of a rustic ritual that will continue to make log and kindling holders a necessity.
Function isn't Everything
While we have focused on the utility of certain furnishings that could be considered old fashioned, another aspect to consider is the aesthetic appeal of antique pieces that were popular in earlier eras. Grandfather clocks are hardly necessary when every electronic device and appliance in our homes constantly reads out the time, yet people still choose to live with them because they are stately and handsome. So even within homes where moments of leisure are more limited than in rustic vacation homes, the good design and craftsmanship of furnishings suited to past lifestyles are worth having around, if for no other reason than to enrich our everyday aesthetics.
