Once again
Devonshire Pine feature heavily on our Living Room Furniture page.
Devonshire New Solid Oak Living Furniture is the first range with it's contemporary styling.
In the same contemporary style is the Derwen Oak Range from
ASL Furniture, the
Oakhampton from DFP Furniture and Wealdon Oak Living Collection from
CPW Furniture.
There are a number of painted living Room Furniture ranges such as the
PD Global Boston and the
CPW Kristina Living Room Furniture collection. If a more rustic appearance is more your taste then there are a variety of ranges that you may wish top consider the
Trafalgar Range, from
DFP Furniture is very popular and the
Devonshire Rustic Oak although more recently added is a hot choice.
Although not made from Oak the
Devonshire Pine Chunky Living Room Furniture is also a collection that falls into the rustic fold. Our Mexican and Indian Furniture Ranges feature heavily here with the PD Global
Kheri Living Room Furniture, the
Santa Fe Mexican Living Room Furniture, the
CPW Convex Collection.
The Convex Collection is one the Darker Furniture Ranges, along these same lines is the
Chunky Mocha Living Room Furniture, and
ASL Brampton Rustic Oak.
It is gratifying to note that our living furniture ranges are often viewed as a worthy alternative to the furniture ranges of the former furniture retailer,
Durham Pine.
Things you may not know about Living Room furniture Throughout the history of dwellings there have been rooms used for cooking and rooms used for sleeping. Then there have been rooms where people might relax, undertake household chores or pursue hobbies or interests.
The first two uses, cooking and dining, have given us the kitchen and dining room. But the last category has produced the parlour, the lounge, the drawing room and so forth. Whatever name it is given, the types of furniture used in these rooms have remained fairly constant. As a form of shorthand, we use the term living room to encompass these furniture types. Which items of living room furniture came first can, to some extent, be related to the different names this room has been given down the centuries.
The first name,
the parlour, originated during the late 14th Century. The parlour was actually a small room adjoining the great hall in the houses of the nobility. The nobles, together with their closest family and friends, could retire to this room to discuss matters, or
parle, in private. Gradually it became popular to take meals in this room instead of in the great hall, so the parlour evolved into the dining room. This room would have been simply furnished with
chairs, a table for meals and something known as a livery or service cupboard which was the forerunner of the modern
sideboard.
By the time of the Renaissance period in Britain, during the mid 17th Century, the etiquette of the day determined that after meals, ladies should leave the gentlemen in the dining room and withdraw. This led to the evolution of the withdrawing room, or
drawing room for short. Drawing room furniture would include comfortable chairs and perhaps a harpsichord or similar instrument for entertainment. Guests would also be entertained in this room and so furniture that would demonstrate the wealth and intellect of the householder would also be present. This might include
bookcases, to show off the valuable books in the householder’s possession, and
cabinets displaying artefacts or collections of significance.
Towards the end of the 18th Century, the
sitting room appeared. This took account of the desire that visitors calling during the daytime, perhaps to take tea, should be accommodated in a different room to that used in the evenings after dinner. The sitting room might also be referred to as a morning room, again for similar reasons. Although the origin of the
nest of tables is not clear (to this writer at least!) it would seem that this would have been an ideal invention for the activities of the sitting room.
The next term to appear is
living room. Now, it has been suggested, on Wikipedia amongst other places, that the term living room was first used by Victorian architects to overcome the unhappy connotations associated with parlours. This, so the reasoning goes, is because parlours were the rooms used for laying out the deceased members of a household. Now while the Victorian obsession with death is well known, the earliest reference to the term ‘living room’ is quoted as 1825 – which is 12 years
before Queen Victoria ascended the throne.
19th Century living rooms would have included the comfortable chairs, end tables,
side tables, bookcases and so on that might be found amongst today’s living room furniture. Curiously that essential item of the modern living room, the
coffee table, did not appear until the latter part of the 19th Century, even though coffee drinking had already been common in Britain for 250 years.
The 20th Century contribution to living room furniture would be the
TV cabinet or unit. Originally watching television was not regarded as a worthwhile pastime and some furniture manufacturers went to great lengths to disguise or completely enclose the television set inside a cabinet. Today fewer such reservations persist and the television or television screen is usually given a place of prominence on a purpose-built cabinet or mounted on the wall.
In conclusion, other names used for living rooms include the term
lounge, which also appeared in the 19th Century, but not until the1880s. It is generally thought to have been a phrase favoured by the burgeoning Middle classes, so would be unknown (or at least irrelevant) to the Lower or Working classes and strenuously avoided by those regarding themselves as Upper class. In more recent times other terms that have come into fashion to describe living room furniture include
family room,
recreation room and even, from the USA,
great room.