Irish Period Furniture Finds New Life as Upcycling Trend Gains Momentum

Walk into a modern kitchen fitted with sleek built-in cabinets and you might find, tucked into the corner, a pinewood dresser from the 1800s. Its shelves hold everyday dishes now, not the formal crockery it was designed to display. This small collision between periods—old and new sharing the same room without apology—has become the signature move of a growing number of Irish homeowners and international design enthusiasts who are reaching back into the 18th and 19th centuries to furnish their lives.

Vernacular Irish furniture, the simple and functional pieces that emerged from rural homes generations ago, is experiencing a quiet renaissance. Blanket boxes, settle beds, farmhouse tables, wooden benches, and hand-turned chairs are appearing not only in period cottages but in contemporary apartments and holiday homes. The movement mirrors the broader appetite for vintage clothing and handmade goods—a hunger for objects with character, made by people whose names we'll never know, built to last rather than to trend. Stuart Cole, who oversees auctions at Adam's, frames it plainly: there is growing international interest in folk art and folk furniture. His auction house is holding its fourth annual online vernacular furniture sale on September 7th, a marker of how steady this appetite has become.

What makes this furniture compelling to modern eyes is partly practical and partly philosophical. A settle bed—a bench by day, a sleeping surface by night—is the original space-saving furniture, though few people use it for sleep anymore. A blanket box from the 1700s, stained pine with a guide price of €600 to €800, holds bedding or toys with the same efficiency it did two centuries ago. These pieces work because they were designed by people solving real problems: how to store things in a small house, how to sit comfortably, how to make a room feel less bare. Cole describes vernacular furniture as embodying a heritage of self-sufficiency, built from locally sourced and affordable materials. Sometimes makers reused parts of older furniture or incorporated found timber—bog oak, driftwood—into new designs. It was upcycling in its earliest form, Cole says, which gives the current trend a certain historical irony: we are now upcycling the upcycled.

The aesthetic appeal is real but secondary. People are not buying these pieces to create a complete period room. Instead, they are mixing them in—a single wooden chair placed for decoration, a dresser softening a kitchen of hard lines and glass. Cole notes that this approach suits shared holiday homes particularly well, where the casual, robust feel of old vernacular pieces helps create a relaxed atmosphere. There is also, undeniably, a nostalgia at work: a longing for a simpler, pre-digital way of living, expressed through the objects that embodied it.

The September 7th auction includes pinewood dressers, historic blanket boxes, and several 19th-century pine settle beds, one estimated at €800 to €1,200. The sale also features Killarney Work, a distinctive Irish furniture style made from native arbutus wood, holly, or yew, inlaid with marquetry designs of local tourist sites and native plants. This work became fashionable in the 1850s when the railway brought visitors to County Kerry. A jewellery cabinet in arbutus wood carries an estimate of €800 to €1,000; a circular table with inlaid marquetry is priced at €6,000 to €8,000. Cole notes that Killarney Work experienced a boom in the 1980s and 1990s, then fell away, and is now returning to favor. Victor Mee's Irish Heritage Collection auction on September 15th will also offer vernacular pieces, including two County Clare pine súgán chairs with woven hemp seats priced at €200 to €300, along with Killarney Work boxes and writing slopes.

Beyond the auction houses, the infrastructure supporting this trend is expanding. Repair cafes—community workshops where people bring broken items to be fixed rather than discarded—are operating across the country. One runs today at the LexIcon library in Dún Laoghaire from 11am to 4pm. Airfield Estate in Dundrum will host a repair cafe on September 26th; the Rediscovery Centre in Ballymun on October 3rd. For those wanting to learn restoration skills, Marianne Heaphy, known as the Revamp Tramp, offers upcycling workshops in Waterford on September 18th and at the Rediscovery Centre on September 26th and November 21st. These gatherings suggest that the trend is not merely aesthetic consumption but a genuine shift in how people think about objects—as things to be repaired, renewed, and passed forward rather than replaced.

As households prepare for the school year, the timing feels deliberate. There are broken chairs in attics, old textiles in drawers, pieces of furniture that have outlived their original purpose but not their utility. The auctions and repair workshops offer a path: take what exists, see it differently, make it work again. It is, in its way, the oldest Irish principle applied to the newest problem—how to live well with less, and how to honor the skill of hands that worked long before ours.