Found object

A piece of occasional furniture which I passed on my way out the other day, and passing it for a second time on my way in, decided to gather it up, thinking that it might serve to shift some of the books in the study off of the floor.

The term 'occasional furniture' came to mind for this piece this morning, but I thought I had better look it up. Copilot offered some corroboration:. 

'Occasional furniture refers to small pieces of furniture that can be used for various purposes as needed. Common items include small tables, nightstands, chests, and easily movable chairs. This type of furniture is designed to be versatile and can be rearranged or moved to fit different spaces or occasions. The term originated from its historical use, where furniture was intended for specific events rather than permanent fixtures'.

although it took me a while to compute his last sentence. Wikipedia at reference 1 created confusion between occasional and accent furniture, which last I had not heard of before.

'The chair that the Queen sat in during the service was a Chippendale occasional Spanish mahogany chair'.

OED stresses the created for an occasion sense of the phrase, offering the sentence above from 1897. Given that Chippendale was by then long dead and that mahogany does not come from Spain, I can only suppose that the writer - in the Westminster Gazette - meant a chair in a Chippendale style called Spanish.

Google is quite loquacious on the subject of accent furniture and it looks as if Wikipedia may have been right. Maybe if I had spent more time with ladies' magazines in waiting rooms, I would have known the usage.

In any event, BH has now given the thing a preliminary clean, discovering that each layer is held on to the next by a pair of brass wing nuts; the original flat pack. Which dates it, to my mind, to the 1960's. Also that the brown veneer is very thin, with both crackle and lift. Left to herself, I think it would be dismantled and lost at the top of the garden, along with the chairs noticed at reference 4.

The red cigar tube was a pick-me-up from a planter outside the Marquis, in town. I don't suppose that it was sold by the Marquis, but it might possibly have been smoked there. Described as a Sumatran Corona, which I had assumed followed naturally from Wintermans being a Dutch company, reflecting their one-time presence in what is now Indonesia. But Google tells me that they are just a brand owned by the Scandinavian people at reference 5.

While Gemini explains that while it did indeed start out as a Dutch company, they sold out in the mid 1960s to British American Tobacco (BAT), who pushed the cigars into the UK mass market. Where I came to know their half coronas, a widely available cheap cigar. I don't suppose that I have smoked one for more than twenty years. BAT went on to sell out to Scandinavian Tobacco Group (STG) in the mid 1990s.

The rather tired pound coin resting in the sun hat had been recovered from a Waitrose trolley. While the sun hat itself served well as a pad to protect the underside of my wrist when carrying the piece home.

The folding umbrella had gone out with me, but was not deployed on this occasion.

It remains to be seen if the piece makes it to the study; presently in the garage. A garage which has not been used for cars for well over twenty years.

PS: the discussion of occasional furniture above reminds me that we came across an advertisement for the Ideal Home exhibition the other day, which at the time struck me very much as a relic of the same 1960s as my piece of accent furniture. But it is alive and well with an elaborate website at reference 2, even if we have missed it for this year.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasional_furniture.

Reference 2: https://www.idealhomeshow.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahogany.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/chair-disposal.html.

Reference 5: https://www.st-group.com/about-us/our-brands/henri-wintermans/.

Group search key: 20260604.