Handmade furniture is furniture made principally by hand, with timber cut, shaped, jointed and finished by a craftsman using hand tools rather than by machine production. In the antiques trade the term also helps distinguish pre-industrial pieces, and later studio and Arts and Crafts work, from factory-made furniture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Until the spread of steam-powered sawmills and machinery in the Victorian period, virtually all furniture was handmade, whether by London cabinetmakers or rural joiners. Tell-tale signs include hand-cut dovetails of slightly irregular spacing and fine proportion, scribe lines left by the maker when marking out joints, pit-saw or plane marks on drawer bottoms and backboards, hand-made nails and screws, and slight asymmetry in carved or turned details. Machine-cut dovetails, by contrast, tend to be uniform and evenly spaced. The Arts and Crafts movement championed handmade furniture as a reaction against industrial production, and makers in the Cotswold tradition kept these methods alive into the twentieth century. Collectors value the evidence of construction as much as the outward appearance, since it helps confirm age, originality and quality.
