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........

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