Ferguson Antique Furniture

Put bed on angle to highlight large window

Q: Our new home has a large, beautiful master bedroom that we would like to decorate, incorporating our traditional mahogany bedroom suite. We have tried to use all the pieces, but the room seems crammed and unbalanced.

The current pieces include: a queen size bed, two night tables, a triple dresser with mirror and a five-drawer chest. We would also like to include a space for our television.

The room is currently painted white and the wall-to-wall carpet is a blue-grey. There is a large bow window with a nice view at one end of the room that allows in a generous amount of natural light.

Prior to investing in any new purchases, we would like to have suggestions on how to place our existing furniture, and any additional items that would make the room cosy and functional.

A: While your bedroom is large and has ample space for the pieces you have listed, both its size and its present colour scheme present a challenge in creating a design that is cosy, comfortable and romantic.

Contrary to convention, which dictates that the bed should be placed flat against the longest wall, I have shown the bed placed at a slight angle, jutting into the room.

There are two reasons for this unusual placement: First, it helps to highlight the bow window, a wonderful and dramatic design element in the room. And it allows you to introduce a second dramatic element — a decorative screen behind the headboard.

These two dramatic elements will complement each other nicely to create a room that is both interesting and romantic.

The beautiful mahogany wood of your furniture will give an elegant, traditional look to the room.

Also, when properly lit, the area immediately around the screen can become a romantic island. Pot lights or track lighting on a dimmer switch will allow the mood to be changed at will.

You will need few additional pieces of furniture other than the screen.

On the drawing, you will see that I have added a couple of ottomans in the window (low enough so as not to obstruct the view). No bedroom should be without a place to sit, for dressing or relaxing and reclining.

Unless a room has enough space for a unit that can hide a television, good visibility from the bed is essential. I would suggest a small unit that can house the television and VCR and can be closed when not in use.

Blue is not a warm colour and a blue dominated colour scheme makes a space feel cool and hard.

'Novelty' Furniture Helped American Manufacturing Survive the ...

Have you ever picked up a book about American 20th-century furniture and marveled at the number of seemingly “non-furniture” items included in the pages? If you look around homes and estates originally furnished in the 1920s and 1930s, you might see many of the same items stashed away in nooks and crannies. The same holds true for old movies. The next time you see “Bringing Up Baby,” “It Happened One Night” or “The Maltese Falcon,” look at the sets. While it may feature the stylish, streamlined Art Deco of the period, it is also more than likely it is filled with small, non-essential items like wall racks and magazine stands, smoking stands and sewing tables. Where did all of that stuff come from?

It was the result of one of the most trying periods of American history—from the American Great Depression of the late 1920s until just after the Second World War. The great stock market crash of October 1929 was just the beginning, as the country was plunged into a deep depression that brought poverty to many middle class working families and threatened the existence of much of American industry, including the furniture manufacturing and retailing industries.

It became harder and harder, then virtually impossible, to sell a new dining room suite or a new living room ensemble to a newly impoverished family that could barely pay the rent and buy food. But there is always that small ember of burning desire to make small additions and improvements to the nest, so the furniture industry came up with a new product line—“novelty” furniture. Companies that could no longer sell the entire houseful of furniture found that they could help the housewife spruce up the dining room, not with a new suite but with a new novelty called the “tea cart” or “tea trolley.” True, the form had been around since the early 1920s, but it became popular after the crash. Not that American households served traditional hot tea in the English manner, but the name gave the wheeled buggy a nice little touch of much-needed class.

And if a little class was good, many choices in the class were better. Major players like Stickley Brothers of Grand Rapids entered the novelty market, offering as many as 18 different finishes and decorative schemes for it line of “hostess wagons.” And they came with tray tops, extra shelves, folding handles and a variety of wheel arrangements that were marketed under a number of names.

The major center of the novelty industry was found in Chicago, with its wide variety of manufacturers. One of the more innovative of the novelty makers was the United Table-Bed Company. It made the famous “Ta-Bed,” a bed that folded up to look like a small breakfast room table. It was marketed as a multiple-use product that “saves space, saves rent, perfectly combines in one piece of furniture the functions ordinarily performed by two.” The Storkline Corporation turned out a line of inexpensive baby cribs and juvenile furniture, while even the powerhouses of Chicago joined in the niche market. Tonk Manufacturing, finding the need for piano stools waning, turned to high chairs and music cabinets. Parlor frame maker Zangerle & Peterson turned to small tables and commodes, while Kruissink & Brothers turned from oak bookcases to wall shelves.

George Macleod, Founder of the Iona Community - A Biography

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