Eastlake

Eastlake style is named after Charles Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste, a book about honesty in construction that was then applied, by manufacturers he never controlled, as a decorative style. What it produced is unmistakable: flat surfaces incised with geometric bands, spindles and chamfers where carving would once have gone.

It belongs to the Aesthetic Movement and shares its taste for ebonised wood and Japanese restraint, but Eastlake is the more austere end of it — ornament produced by cutting into the surface rather than adding to it.

The book years (1868–1880) are the intended version: visible construction, plain surfaces, ornament only where it explains the joint.

The commercial version (1875–1890) is the one that survives — spindles, incised bands and dark walnut applied to factory furniture.