Does it matter? There is a lot of 100 year old furniture out there that nobody wants. They don't fit modern lifestyles.

100 year houses are only livable because someone put a ton of money into retrofitting things like plumbing, electric, and HVAC. Most of that has had major rework done several times as well since it was first added. Even at that, the fundamentals of those houses mean that they cannot be retrofitting for good insulation, and it can be argued they should all be scrapped for that reason.

I would say more tastes than lifestyles. You can use old wardrobes, drawers etc. just fine. It's just that people are used to looking at vaguely modern (often bland and disposable) stuff from the media, and at least think other people would think them weird and nonconforming for using old furniture. Even if you can get it relatively cheap, which is suggested by the "no one wants it" phrase.

I think there is an ethos of buying new and overpriced (and also buying "experiences") to show off that you have money for that and aren't some poor nerd trying to optimize their budget at the expense of consumerism. Often you don't actually have that much money for actual conspicuous consumption, so at least you're trying to imitate the Apple aesthetic. I am getting this vibe from talking to a distinct set of people of my age group, of course not all.

A different take on lifestyles: unfortunately there's a big gap in convenience between being able to move across the world and get everything you need in one afternoon in IKEA, and tracking it all down second hand.

The poor quality furniture of 100 years ago is no longer around.

Households had way less furniture in general, then, too, and yeah, some of it was makeshift or rough-built and probably didn't make it to today.

Office furniture seems to have been incredibly well-built, though, by modern standards. Kinda like how office and government buildings used to be built a lot better. Institutions seem to have cared a lot more about that kind of thing back then. They built desks for ordinary low-paid clerks or typists like they expected the office to still be running, and still using that same desk, in 200 years.

[EDIT] Also, part of what makes older furniture seem so nice is that excellent-quality wood was abundant. It seems so nice because they used wood that'd be ultra-expensive luxury-grade today, for, like, interior structural parts you never even see. Same story for houses. I've seen wooden support beams that'd be almost impossible to find at any price, today, the quality's so high and the piece is so large. Floor underlayment (again, not even intended to be seen) so knot-free it'd probably be used for veneer, now. That kind of thing.

It is called survivorship bias. For example I can look back to 80s NES games. Some of those games are very good. But I would say 80% of the total catalog were either very bland or just outright bad. Most consumer type goods have this issue. In 30 years we will look back at this time and say 'they dont make XYZ like they used to' then point at the cream of the crop of whatever genre XYZ is in for this year. Just remember the same year that Shawshank Redemption came out so did Leonard Part 6.

You make a good point, but your dates on Leonard ('87) and Shawshank ('94) are a little off.

Consumers don't have much of a choice. Wages have stagnated for decades, so their incomes' purchasing power has decreased over time. It's often a choice between buying what's affordable or not buying it at all.

Your example is true only if you include the criteria that it be affordable. You can probably get any furniture you want made locally or by a highly skilled person far away who is willing to ship to you.

100 years ago, how much did the family dinner table cost? Would you measure it in hours or days of salary? When that family in 1923 went table shopping, they were either going to buy from a company like Sears Roebuck or from a local store and there probably wasn't much variety from either source.

Today, there's lots of cheap stuff available, but there's also lots of high end custom stuff available as well. We have more of everything.

Exactly. What we’ve done is not lower the quality bar on “excellent”, we’ve actually raised the quality bar on “cheap”.

We have way less in the middle. A lot of super high end luxury stuff, a lot of very cheap affordable stuff.

There's a moat, and it's very evident just by looking at family pictures from the sixties and eighties.

There's absolutely beautiful and durable furniture available, it's just a lot more expensive than Ikea. There's a local place that makes furniture on-demand; as far as I can tell, the quality is great, but we're talking $8–10k for a dining table. That segment of the market still exists and I don't see it going anywhere.

Cheap, mass-produced furniture has taken the bottom of the market but there really is a wide variety available today.

See Japan, it will go out at one stage, these are hard jobs with low margin and returns. Quality of raw materials is going down too

Modern furniture is much lighter and easier to disassemble, thanks to screws, nuts and bolts being much cheaper than 100 years ago.