Late 20th Century Harden Queen Anne Style Stool Set, A Pair

Details

Description

Quick Hits
Brand/Maker: Harden Furniture
Piece Name: Queen Anne Style Stools (pair)
Style: Queen Anne / American Traditional
Materials: Solid … Read more Quick Hits
Brand/Maker: Harden Furniture
Piece Name: Queen Anne Style Stools (pair)
Style: Queen Anne / American Traditional
Materials: Solid cherry wood; four cabriole legs with decorative carvings; upholstered padded tops (plaid with piping — upholstery ready for replacement)
Era: Late 20th Century
Country of Origin: USA
Condition: Good structurally; upholstery needs replacement (priced accordingly)
Why We Love It: Carved cabriole legs on solid cherry frames — the bones are impeccable. Consider the upholstery budget an invitation to make them entirely your own.

More About This Item
Here is the honest truth about these Harden stools: the frames are exceptional. Four cabriole legs on each, carved with the decorative detail that distinguishes Harden's Queen Anne work from simpler interpretations, in solid cherry that has the weight and warmth of proper hardwood construction. The manufacturer's mark is under each stool confirming the provenance. The bones are genuinely good.

The current upholstery — a plaid with piping — is ready for replacement, and the price reflects it. For a buyer with a fabric in mind, this is actually the ideal scenario: a perfectly proportioned solid-wood stool frame at a fair price, waiting for the velvet or linen or bouclé or cut velvet that will make them the most considered objects in whatever room they end up in. A good upholsterer will have these done in a few hours, and the result will be a pair of stools that look entirely bespoke.

Under the Harden console table from this same collection, these stools would be the pulled-together detail that makes the entry or living room arrangement look professionally conceived. On their own — at the end of a bed, flanking a fireplace, tucked under a kitchen island — they work beautifully in that same versatile way that small, well-made stools always do.

Design Style
Queen Anne stools are one of the most adaptable objects in traditional furniture. The cabriole leg format — that graceful double curve that Queen Anne designers refined into an art form in the early 18th century — reads as appropriately decorative even when a stool is pushed into a corner or slid under a table. The carved leg details on this Harden pair place them in the better tier of Queen Anne revival production: not plain cabrioles, but properly worked legs with the kind of carving that shows the craftsman's hand.

In fresh upholstery, these stools will work in Queen Anne and traditional rooms, English Country spaces, Grandmillennial interiors, and any eclectic setting where a small traditional wood piece provides the warm counterpoint to more contemporary furnishings.

Brand Legacy
Harden Furniture's nearly two centuries of continuous operation in upstate New York is one of the American furniture industry's more remarkable stories. Their commitment to solid hardwood construction — real cherry, real joinery, real craft — has remained consistent across periods when most competitors shifted to veneers and engineered materials. These stools, with manufacturer's marks confirming their Harden provenance, represent that tradition at a small scale: modest in size, significant in quality. See less