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Our Rustic Sideboards are drawn from a selection of woods including Oak and Mango. With a variety of styles and sizes to choose from, we have something to suit all tastes. Our sideboards are fully assembled and hand crafted from solid wood, with free delivery and placement in the room of your choice.
If a sideboard just doesn't seem enough, take a look at our Rustic Dressers.

What do we mean by rustic furniture?
The definition of rustic furniture is rather different in the USA and Canada to the UK.  It would appear that Americans (and presumably Canadians) regard rustic furniture as being furniture made of wood that is still in an unworked or virtually unworked form.  In other words, furniture made of sticks or sections of tree trunk that can still clearly be identified as part of a tree.

In Britain rustic furniture would at one time have been taken to mean furniture from a rural area or made by rural craftsmen.  A rustic sideboard would therefore have been quite an unusual item as sideboards were originally the preserve of the most affluent so were unlikely to have been found in more humble country dwellings.  It is possible however that a wealthy farmer or country dweller may have commissioned such a piece from their local carpenter or cabinet maker rather than the more fashionable cabinet makers and joiners.  In more recent times the meaning of rustic has changed its context and now applies to any furniture that looks, or has been made to look, old or used – regardless of where it has been made.  The term distressed furniture would therefore be more accurate – though perhaps this is regarded as a less attractive description for marketing purposes.

How did the ‘rustic’ look become so popular?
So what made ‘rustic furniture’ so popular and lead to the creation of the rustic sideboard?  Certainly before the middle of the 20th Century, such furniture would have been dismissed as tatty or poor quality.  It might be suggested that two major factors influenced the rise of distressed furniture.  The first was a growing social acceptance of individual expression or individuality.  This was perhaps a public reaction to the effects of two World Wars when conformity had been required and encouraged to achieve common goals.  Any actions or expressions putting the individual above the collective view had been largely discouraged.

But in the sixties it became accepted that an individual should be allowed to pursue their own objectives and do what pleased them.  It was no longer necessary for personal taste to be dictated by convention.  If an individual wanted to furnish their property in their own style with, for example a rustic sideboard, this was now more socially acceptable than it had been in times past.

The second major factor was the effect of changes to Britain’s system of taxation.  Voters felt that the sacrifices made during two major world conflicts should be rewarded by a fairer distribution of the country’s wealth.  Consequently landowners and the occupants of large country houses were subject to new taxation regimes which made it difficult 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, while others simply faded into decline.   

Against this background, it became acceptable and then fashionable in ‘society circles’ to have interiors furnished with items that had once been elegant but were now decidedly faded or worn.  This change in circumstances led to the birth of what is now known as shabby chic.  Furniture that was not just patinated like a good quality antique, but positively worn became desirable.  In fact the snobbishness of some ‘old money’ families was perhaps typified by the late Alan Clark MP’s humorous – but dismissive – description self-made millionaire Michael Heseltine as “someone who buys his own furniture.”   

While the term shabby chic is usually applied to painted furniture, the concept of having worn or faded furniture also related to furniture in wood finishes.  In both cases, original distressed or shabby chic items could not fulfil demand for the new look, so entrepreneurs began producing new furniture that was made to look distressed or rustic – hence the rustic sideboard was born.   

The arrival of the rustic sideboard
The early supplies of rustic or ‘distressed’ furniture, were actually second hand items that had been beaten with chains, punctured with darts or even peppered with shotgun pellets to achieve a worn appearance.  Gradually the methods for producing that rustic sideboard were refined and improved.  Today’s rustic-style furniture generally has a more convincing ‘patination’ to it, even though this has been achieved in a modern workshop rather than through years of hard use in a household.

Reclaimed furniture is, to use the strictest definition, furniture made from timber that has already been used elsewhere.  A typical example of such furniture is that made from old railway sleepers or telegraph poles.  However the idea is by no means new, as timber from old ships and other sources – such as the monasteries closed during the dissolution under Henry VIII – have always been re-used.  During the post-war period of the 1950s, when all materials were in short supply, timber from the packing cases that supplied American forces based in Britain were used for furniture making.   

On occasions when the wood is not second hand but has been made to look like such, this furniture is described as reclaimed-style furniture.