Throw out your grandfather clocks, the naysayers said, and banish your commodes to the scrapheap and junkshop. Brown furniture – invented in the Georgian and Regency eras and popularised for the mass market in the Victorian period – has been decreed by those tastemakers in the know to be as dead as Jacob Marley – a man who undoubtedly would have cherished those heavy mahogany bed frames and cabinets that were synonymous with his age – and showing even fewer signs of returning, even in spectral form.  

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The reasons for the apparent demise of brown furniture are less to do with a rejection of sturdy, well-built items that were once the pride and joy of any household and more because we are living smaller lives, in all senses. Once, even an ordinary middle-class household might have expected to run to three bedrooms, a sitting room, a dining room and perhaps even a few other ancillary spaces. These large, space-hogging items would have done extremely well to furnish these rooms. But a combination of reduced space, with people apparently needing far less square footage to live in than they did a generation ago, with a Conran and IKEA-influenced trend towards light-wood minimalism has meant that the era of antique walnut and rosewood appears to have met its Waterloo.  

As someone who grew up surrounded by brown furniture, news of its demise is something that........

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