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What is rustic furniture?
Rustic furniture has a rather different meaning in America and Canada than it does in the UK.  It seems that Americans (and presumably Canadians) think of rustic furniture as being furniture made of wood that is still in an unworked or virtually unworked form.  In other words, the furniture is made of sticks or sections of tree trunk that can still clearly be seen to have come from a tree.

Before about 60 years ago, rustic furniture in Britain would have meant furniture from a rural area or made by rural craftsmen.  A rustic chest of drawers would therefore have been made by the local carpenter or cabinet maker rather than the more fashionable cabinet makers and joiners with London premises.  But in more recent times the meaning of rustic has changed and is now applied to any furniture that looks, or has been made to look, old or used – regardless of wherever it has been made.  A more accurate description would perhaps be distressed furniture, although it is likely this was widely regarded as being a less attractive description for marketing purposes.

So how did ‘rustic’ become so popular?
On reflection, purchasing rustic furniture might be seen as a little odd, so how did it become so widely accepted? What makes a rustic chest of drawers an acceptable item of furniture? It is fair to say that before about the middle of the 20th Century, such furniture would have been dismissed as tatty or poor quality.  It could perhaps be argued that two major factors influenced the rise of distressed furniture.  The first was a growing public acceptance of the freedom of the individual to express their own ideas of style and taste.  This was a natural reaction following two World Wars when conformity had been required and encouraged to achieve common goals.  Actions or expressions putting the individual above the collective view had been largely discouraged, but such a requirement was no longer so essential.

By the 1960s it was largely accepted that an individual should be allowed to pursue their own objectives and do what pleased them.  No longer was it necessary for personal taste to be dictated by convention.  If a person wanted to furnish their property in their own individual style with, for example a rustic chest of drawers, this was now more socially acceptable than it had been previously.

Another major factor was the consequences of changes made to Britain’s system of taxation.  Voters felt the sacrifices made by ordinary people during two major world conflicts should be rewarded with a fairer distribution of the country’s wealth.  As a result landowners and those living in large country houses were subject to new taxation regimes which made it much harder, or sometimes impossible, to maintain these properties in the same way as in the past.  Some were bequeathed to the nation through organisations such as the National Trust, others started opening funfairs (such as Alton towers) or keeping lions (Longleat) while others simply faded into decline.   

In this new climate it became accepted, and then fashionable, in ‘society circles’ to have interiors furnished with items that had once been elegant but were now decidedly faded or worn.  The new era led to the birth of what is now known as shabby chic.  It became desirable to have furniture that was not just patinated like a good quality antique, but positively worn.  The snobbishness of some ‘old money’ families was concisely, though humorously, illustrated by the late Alan Clark MP’s description self-made millionaire Michael Heseltine as “someone who buys his own furniture.”   

The term shabby chic is commonly applied to painted furniture but the concept of having worn or faded furniture is also relevant to furniture in wood finishes.  In both instances, supplies of original distressed or shabby chic items could not fulfil demand, so entrepreneurs began producing new furniture that was made to look distressed or rustic – hence the arrival of the rustic chest of drawers.   

The rustic chest of drawers evolves
Early supplies of rustic or ‘distressed’ furniture, were actually second hand items that were ‘aged’ by being beaten with chains, punctured with darts or even peppered with shotgun pellets!  Gradually the methods for producing furniture such as a rustic chest of drawers were refined and improved.  New rustic-style furniture has a more convincing ‘patination,’ even though it is achieved within minutes in a modern workshop rather than through years of hard use in a household.

The term reclaimed furniture is, strictly speaking, furniture made from timber already previously used elsewhere.  A typical contemporary example would be furniture made from old railway sleepers or telegraph poles.  But this idea is by no means new, as the timbers from old ships and other sources – such as the monasteries closed by Henry VIII – have always been re-used.  During the post-war period in Britain, when all materials were in short supply, timber from the packing cases that had supplied American bases in Britain were used for furniture making.   

In some situations when the wood is not second hand but has just been made to look like such, the furniture is described as reclaimed-style furniture.