A World of Vernacular Furniture: The Orkney Chair

The study of vernacular furniture can teach us a lot about not only the development of understandings of furniture, nor only of the development of societies and cultures, nor nor only only about relationships between furniture and wider realities, but also how the position of furniture as a cultural good, as a good embedded in a culture and society, can see furniture serve as a component of projected understandings of heritage and identity, and in doing so can endow attributes on an object of furniture it doesn’t naturally, inherently, possess.

Or need.

Something particularly well expressed in the (hi)stories of the straw-backed chair, a.k.a. the Orkney Chair¹