SIDEBOARD HISTORY

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 51, 24 November 1926, Page 17

SIDEBOARD HISTORY

The sideboard is an article of furniture which, perhaps better than any other, shows how far we can go from the tenets of sound furniture construction. The history of the sideboard is obvious. The main board was the trestle or refrectory table groaning under the viands, and the sideboard was the sidetable on yvhich other victuals yvere placed. With neither cupboards nor drayvers it was for all intents and purposes a shelf, and on the other side of the ancestral hearth stood the cupboard, on yvhich the valued pieces of crockery were placed out of harm’s way of those who dined too yvell. First’ drawers were added to the sideboard and then quite late, for it was Adams who conceived the idea, the sideboard was made a pedestal one, that is to say, tyvo massive cupboards yvere made, and a massive bridge of elephantine proportions was throyvn from one to the other. Still Adams’s decortion relieved the deadliness of the proportions, though even he would appear to have fallen into the trap of constructing ornament yvhen he erected an urn at each end to cap his pedestals.