A Brief History of the Chest of Drawers: From Coffer to Tallboy
The chest of drawers is a solved storage problem that took centuries to solve, and Furniture in Fashion traces how it was solved. This editorial history follows the form from the medieval coffer, a single lidded box in which every garment was buried beneath every other, through the transitional chests that carried drawers only in the base, to the fully drawered case furniture that has barely changed since the seventeenth century. The report explains why the tallboy emerged as a vertical answer to scarce floor space, how the British tallboy relates to the North American highboy, and why low wide chests and tall narrow ones have coexisted rather than one replacing the other. It also examines the practical modern differences: timber bearers against metal runners, finish trade offs, and why drawer depth rather than external width decides whether a chest works in a British bedroom....
