Fine cabinets were rare luxuries in the West before 1650
Cabinets are boxy household cases—shelved or drawered—built to stash or show belongings, either freestanding or fixed to a wall, and usually built from timber or engineered wood. Before about 1650, elaborate furniture hardly existed for ordinary Western European and North American households; few people needed or could pay for it.
Cabinets may have doors fitted with hardware and sometimes a lock, along with drawers or shelves, and short ones often carry a finished top used for display or as a work surface, like a kitchen countertop. A bedroom cabinet with stacked drawers for clothing is a dresser or chest of drawers, and a small bedside one is a nightstand. Built-in cabinets are usually custom-made and fixed to a floor, wall or opening, as in modern kitchens, while free-standing ones are sold off the shelf and can be moved.
Before industrial design, cabinet makers both conceived and built every piece of furniture, and in the late 18th century Thomas Sheraton, Thomas Chippendale and George Hepplewhite published books of furniture forms. Steam-powered tools and mass production during the Industrial Revolution ended the traditional shop's dominance. The Arts and Crafts movement, starting in Britain in the mid-19th century and spreading to the United States and across the Empire, revived demand for handmade work as a reaction against machine production, and after the Second World War woodworking became a popular middle-class hobby.
Styles differ sharply. Mission furniture uses thick straight lines, flat panels and oak, often white oak darkened by 'fuming', with visible black iron hardware. Shaker pieces put function and symmetry first and favour fruit woods, Early American work prizes cherry and walnut with turned spindles, and French Provincial pieces are ornate, often painted or gilded, and were originally frequently made of beech.
Cabinets are either face-frame, with a supporting frame about 4 centimetres wide on the front, or frameless in the European style, and modern ones are usually frameless boxes of plywood, chipboard or MDF clad in veneer or laminate. American kitchens pair base cabinets 24 inches deep and 34.5 inches high with 12-inch-deep wall cabinets, and widths rise in 3-inch steps. European adjustable legs let makers cut 30-inch sides, getting six from a 4-by-8-foot sheet instead of four.
Source: Cabinetry
