- Brown furniture
- The trade's affectionate, slightly rueful name for fine antique wooden furniture — walnut, mahogany, oak. Long out of fashion and correspondingly undervalued, which makes excellent period pieces unusually affordable today.
- Chinoiserie
- A European decorative style imitating and reimagining Chinese and East Asian motifs — lacquer, pagodas, birds and figures — especially popular from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. A recurring thread in old-world rooms.
- Decorative arts
- The arts concerned with the design of objects for use and ornament — furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles — as distinct from painting and sculpture. The field within which old-world interiors are most fluent.
- Directoire
- A short, austere French style of the late 1790s, between Louis XVI and Empire, marked by clean classical lines and restrained ornament. Named for the post-Revolutionary Directory government.
- Eighteenth-century French
- Shorthand for the high decorative arts of pre-Revolutionary France — the cabinetmaking, gilding and upholstery of the Louis XV and Louis XVI eras — held by many to be the summit of European furniture-making.
- English country house
- The defining old-world idiom: layered, comfortable, antique-filled rooms that look accumulated over generations. Chintz, needlework, faded colour and studied imperfection, codified in the twentieth century by decorators such as John Fowler.
- Gesso
- A smooth white ground of chalk or plaster of Paris bound in glue, applied to wood before painting or gilding. The base beneath most giltwood; its fine carving is part of why old gilded objects feel so alive.
- Giltwood
- Carved wood finished in gold leaf over a gesso ground, as in mirrors, frames and console tables. Antique giltwood, softly worn, reflects light with a warmth no new gilding matches.
- Grand Tour
- The extended cultural journey through Europe — above all Italy — undertaken by the well-to-do from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. It shaped a taste for antiquity and brought home the objects that still furnish old-world rooms.
- Gustavian
- The pale, restrained Swedish neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century, named for King Gustav III. Painted furniture in soft greys and off-whites; quiet, light-filled, and much used to lift heavier schemes.
- Heirloom
- An object passed down within a family across generations. In this world the word is also an aspiration: rooms made so that what fills them could one day become heirlooms.
- Japanned
- A European imitation of East Asian lacquer, built up in layers of varnish over wood and often decorated in gold. A favourite of chinoiserie cabinets and bureaux.
- Louis XVI
- The neoclassical French style of the 1770s–80s: straight tapering legs, restrained classical ornament, a turn away from the curves of the rococo. Among the most enduringly copied of all furniture styles.
- Marquetry
- Decorative patterns formed from thin pieces of veneer — woods, and sometimes shell or metal — inlaid into a surface. A high-skill cabinetmaking craft prized in eighteenth-century furniture.
- Neoclassical
- The broad late-eighteenth-century revival of Greek and Roman forms — symmetry, columns, restraint — that runs through Louis XVI, Gustavian, Regency and Directoire alike.
- Patina
- The surface a material acquires through age and careful use: the mellowing of waxed wood, the soft wear on a chair arm, the gentle dulling of gilding. The most prized and least reproducible quality of an antique — and quite distinct from damage.
- Period piece
- An object actually made in the era whose style it carries, as opposed to a later reproduction of that style. The structural material of an old-world room.
- Provenance
- The documented history of an object — who made it, who owned it, how it has come down to the present. Provenance turns mere age into authenticity, and is the difference between a piece you live with and one you can stand behind.
- Regency
- The English style of roughly 1811–20 (and a little either side): classical, sometimes exotic, often bolder than its Georgian predecessors, with strong lines and motifs drawn from Greece, Rome and Egypt.
- Vernacular furniture
- Honest, regional, often country-made pieces produced outside the high styles — farmhouse tables, rush-seat chairs, painted cupboards. Their plainness gives an old-world room its grounding and ease.