Three Super Weird Facts About Furniture That You Probably Didn’t Know

Furniture is a staple of American decorating and something that most people use every single day. Most of the time we don’t even notice the furniture around us — or really care that much about it for that matter — but furniture is way more interesting than you think it is. Here are three weird facts about furniture that you probably never knew.

Modern furniture design started in Germany.
The first modern furniture designers were part of the Bauhaus school of art in Germany. The term modern furniture here refers to furniture that was made from the 19th century to the present, which is influenced by the modernist style. Though what we find in designer modern furniture stores might not always suit our taste, it does have a much more interesting history than you think.

Office chairs might have been invented by Charles Darwin.
What we picture when we think of office chairs is a chair with five casters, two arms, and a design with ergonomics in mind. What you probably didn’t know is that the first person to put wheels on an armchair was actually the English naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin. He added the wheels so he could more easily move around to look at his specimens (but he might have used it to slide over to the copy machine like we do today if he’d had one).

The ancient Greeks and Romans were the first to use dining tables.
These days dining tables are an everyday part of American life — or at least the struggle to get the whole family around it at once is. However, we obviously weren’t the first people to use them. Ancient Egyptians were the first ones to use tables to keep things (like food) off the floor, but the ancient Greeks and Romans were the first to use them for dining purposes.

Do you know any other weird facts about furniture? Let us know in the comments. Helpful links.