50 free Furniture trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Furniture trivia questions with answers. Furniture is the design history you sit on every day, and this quiz covers it from Neolithic stone dressers to flat-pack bookcases. It takes in Skara Brae and ancient Egypt, the Greek klismos, medieval oak, Louis XIV, XV and XVI, Thomas Chippendale's Director, Thonet's steam-bent No. 14 and its 50 million sales, Windsor and Shaker chairs, the Bauhaus and Marcel Breuer's Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair, the Eames lounge, Arne Jacobsen's Egg, Saarinen's Tulip, Eero Aarnio's Ball, Verner Panton's plastic S, Hans Wegner's 500 chairs, the Monobloc, and IKEA's founder, acronym, naming rules and Billy bookcase. It also explains where the words come from: sofa, ottoman, credenza, chaise longue, wardrobe and chesterfield, plus the stories behind the Murphy bed, the La-Z-Boy, the waterbed and the Adirondack chair. Easy questions ask what a wardrobe stores and which country IKEA comes from. Medium ones cover famous designers and their chairs. Hard ones want the number of pieces in a Thonet No. 14, the year of Chippendale's catalogue, the Bauhaus workshop Breuer ran and the opera-singer legend behind the fold-away bed. Every answer has been checked against reference articles on furniture history and individual pieces, and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The oldest surviving furniture, stone dressers and beds from around 3000 BCE, was found where?
Skara Brae in Orkney
With almost no wood on Orkney, the villagers built everything from stone; the dresser faced the door of every house.
Q 02The French and German words for furniture (meubles, Möbel) come from a Latin word meaning what?
Moveable goods
English is unusual in using 'furniture' for household objects specifically.
Q 03The klismos, an elegant chair with a curved backrest and splayed legs, originated in which civilisation?
Ancient Greece
The Romans copied it, and its shape is still part of the vocabulary of furniture design.
Q 04Furniture of the European Middle Ages was typically made of which wood?
Oak
It was heavy and carved; comparatively little survives from the 5th to 15th centuries.
Q 05What was Thomas Chippendale's 1754 pattern book, the first comprehensive furniture catalogue, called?
The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director
It was so influential that 'Chippendale' became shorthand for any furniture in his style, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Q 06Three French monarchs lent their names to 18th-century furniture styles. Which was NOT one of them?
Louis XVIII
Louis Quatorze, Quinze and Seize; Boulle cabinets peaked under the Sun King.
Q 07Thonet's No. 14 'bistro chair' of 1859 is considered the world's first what?
Mass-produced item of furniture
Gebrüder Thonet sold 50 million between 1859 and 1930; it packs flat as six pieces of steam-bent wood, ten screws and two nuts.
Q 08How many pieces of steam-bent wood make up a Thonet No. 14 chair?
Six
Michael Thonet had patented his bentwood process in 1856 and made the first bentwood rocking chair in 1860.
Q 09What construction defines a Windsor chair?
Legs and back pushed into holes in a solid wooden seat
The seat is usually carved into a shallow saddle shape, and the spindles were traditionally turned on a pole lathe.
Q 10Shaker furniture was developed by a religious sect whose guiding principles were what?
Simplicity, utility and honesty
The United Society of Believers had no interest in reproducing canopy beds or highboys.
Q 11Marcel Breuer designed the tubular-steel Wassily chair while heading which Bauhaus department?
Cabinet-making
Despite the name, it was not made for Kandinsky, who merely admired it; the Italian firm Gavina named it decades later.
Q 12The Barcelona chair was designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for what?
The German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition
Knoll has made it since 1964 but only named it 'Barcelona' in 1987.
Q 13The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman, introduced in 1956, is made and sold by which company?
Herman Miller
Q 21The letters of IKEA stand for the founder's initials plus what?
The family farm and his home village
Elmtaryd was the farm and Agunnaryd the village in Småland.
Q 22According to IKEA's naming system, beds are named after places in which country?
Norway
Sofas take Swedish place names, textiles Danish ones, lamps are named for seas and lakes and outdoor furniture for islands.
Q 23IKEA's Billy bookcase, designed in 1979, has sold roughly how many units?
140 million
Designer Gillis Lundgren was IKEA's fourth employee; in 2009 the company was making 130,000 a week.
Charles and Ray Eames built it from moulded plywood and leather; early shells were veneered in Brazilian rosewood.
Q 14Arne Jacobsen designed the Egg chair in 1959 for which building?
The SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen
Fritz Hansen still makes it; a Copenhagen McDonald's even has one.
Q 15Eero Saarinen said he designed the single-stemmed Tulip chair to clear up 'the slum of' what?
Legs
Made for Knoll in 1955-56, the range was first called the Pedestal Group.
Q 16The Ball Chair, a fibreglass sphere on a stem, was designed in 1963 by which Finnish designer?
Eero Aarnio
He made the prototype by laminating fibreglass over a wet-paper-covered plywood mould.
Q 17Verner Panton's S-shaped design of the 1960s was a landmark for what reason?
World's earliest moulded plastic seat
Mies van der Rohe had floated the idea of a stackable plastic chair before World War II; the Dane made it real in the 1960s.
Q 18Roughly how many different chairs did Danish designer Hans Wegner create in his lifetime?
Over 500
More than 100 went into mass production, including the Round Chair and the Wishbone chair, both from 1949.
Q 19The white stackable Monobloc, described as the world's most common plastic chair, is made from what?
Polypropylene
It is injection-moulded in one piece; French engineer Henry Massonnet's Fauteuil 300 of 1972 is one claimed origin.
Q 20IKEA was founded in 1943 by which 17-year-old?
Ingvar Kamprad
It began as a mail-order business and only started reselling furniture five years later; the first store opened in Älmhult in 1958.
Q 24Since which year has IKEA been the world's largest furniture retailer?
2008
Its operational hub remains in Älmhult, though the brand is owned by a Netherlands-based company.
Q 25The word 'sofa' reached English via Turkish from an Arabic word meaning what?
Ledge or bench
'Couch' originally meant an item for lying or sleeping on; settee, chesterfield and davenport are other names.
Q 26The upholstered footstool called a pouffe or hassock takes its more common name from what?
The Ottoman Empire
In Turkey it was a low platform piled with cushions; Europe adopted a smaller version in the late 18th century.
Q 27Who reputedly commissioned the deep-buttoned leather sofa with arms and back the same height?
The 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Philip Stanhope's name stuck; in early 1900s Britain and Canada 'chesterfield' meant any couch.
Q 28In Italian, the word 'credenza' originally meant what?
Belief or trust
It is related to the English 'credence'; today it means a sideboard or office storage unit.
Q 29'Chaise longue' is French for what?
Long chair
English speakers turned it into 'chaise lounge' by folk etymology when the sofa arrived from France in the late 1700s.
Q 30Before it meant a piece of furniture, the word 'wardrobe' referred to what?
A room where garments were stored
The word appeared in English in the early 14th century; armoire and almirah are synonyms.