A lot of that furniture is just sorta irrelevant. 21st century adults don’t need secretaries or China cabinets, and most don't want any formal living room or dining room furniture. We don't have ROOM for it. We aren't our parents or our grandparents. We don't own 3000 sq ft detached homes.
I've thought about this for awhile and can't decide if it's because we've rightfully shaken off an uptight bourgeois culture of dinner parties, china, and china cabinets, or if it's because the people who think they're middle class have fallen so far down the well that they can't afford to even pretend they're rich any more.
I mean, I don’t see how the second is in the slightest bit debatable. Fifty or sixty years ago you could afford a car, a smallish but not tiny home (with a yard!) and support kids with a single income - at a factory or other not overly skilled job.
Now many college grads have room mates… and I’m not talking about 20-somethings.
I'm not sure how common 3000 sq. ft. detached houses were in grandparents' days unless they were quite wealthy.
As you say though, a lot of furniture is sort of irrelevant. I have a decent-sized house (about 2000 sq. ft.) but don't really have a good place to put a large enough dining room table for more than a small group. My parents regularly had dinner parties for a dozen people in a formal dining room.
I do have moderately-sized groups over now and then but people either eat on their laps/at the coffee table in my smallish den/living room (old New England farmhouse which has been opened up somewhat but still tends towards smaller rooms). I have a couple of big heavy pieces of furniture from my parents but they're just out of the way upstairs to essentially store stuff. The main reason I even still have them is that they're out of the way and provide some useful storage.
In my personal experience, it’s about 50/50 this and lack of home ownership. Whenever I talk to someone 60+, with kids, who is downsizing out of the old family home they inevitably mention having to sell (or more likely scrap or donate) most of their old furniture because their kids either don’t want it or don’t own a home to put it in (and are renting somewhere too small).
Many of their kids, people in my peer group, are in their 30s to early 40s now and still aren’t married and don’t have kids and don’t own a home.
I’ve got a family and a house and I still wouldn’t want any of the old, quality furniture my parents have. It’s just not anything I have a need for.
I think it's a bunch of reasons but agree it's probably 50/50. I can certainly relate to having no where to put stuff when my grandparents passed away, so I took one item I could fit into my bedroom.
Another reason is, the craftspeople to maintain this furniture is much rarer. I have a dressing table that was my great grandmothers. It's a beautiful piece and solid as a rock but it's showing wear and tear of daily use every day of my life (and who knows when it was previously restored). Finding someone capable of restoring it is hard, and it's a long manual process which would cost substantially more than buying a new piece. I'll never part with the thing but I doubt I'll ever get it restored either.
My mother has an old settee that was her aunts. It's falling apart needing new springs and upholstery. She's been on a waiting list to get it repaired for years, and the upholsterer isn't taking more clients as he's past retirement age and now does it just a few days a week with a backlog of years.
Refinishing, on the other hand, is mostly not fun. The chemistry ranges from slow and ineffective to fast and not great to spend a lot of time around (and increasingly hard to buy as a muggle). Veneers on anything even semi-modern are paper-thin and you risk sanding through them. Nooks and crannies are a pain to get old finish out of, even with the help of chemistry.
And there's always the risk that someone used Pledge (or something else with silicone oil in it) on the piece in the past. Which you won't discover until you get the first coat of new finish on and get fisheye.
Upholstery, at least, can be fun. A lot of upholsterers do reupholstery work, and many are quite good at it. If at first you don't find someone who can do tied springs, keep looking; they're out there.
> We don't have ROOM for it. We aren't our parents or our grandparents. We don't own 3000 sq ft detached homes.
I think the implication you're making that previous generations had much more living space is false. My grandparents lived in a rural area in a pretty small home with one bathroom. If you look at 50s tract homes, they're all small by modern standards.
They're strongly correlated. The more space you have, the lower the bar of "how many days a year do I need to use this to justify the space it takes up.
