Chest of Drawer Opening Pulls

Modern chests sometimes have no pulls to assist in opening the drawers….no knobs or handles to tug open a drawer or cabinet door. Today, we often use magnets to hold a cupboard door closed, and if a surface has enough variance, we use our fingers to flick a door open. But from pre-Victorian times up to WWII, nearly all storage furniture had various kinds of small handles to pull open cabinet doors, armoires and drawers. These ranged from special keys to knobs to handles of word or mental. Pulls were necessary because furniture was made of wood, and wood surfaces tend to stick—a lot. The modern acrylic and metallic finishes of today are sleek, and doors and drawers usually open and close easily, but older wooden furniture, when it was new and as our antiques today, will stick and require extra strength or rattling to loosen and open. But in the past, drawers and cabinets stuck—at least in times of high humidity when wood tends to swell.

Cupboard furniture of the past generally had wood or metal knobs, often in the form of rounded balls but also in decorative shapes, sometimes with a small matching backplate. Such pulls were held in place by a passing a screw (or earlier, a metal spike) through the wooden door, usually from behind. Most wooden pulls were stained to match the surrounding cabinet surface. Others were often made of brass. And a person just tugged the knob until a cabinet door or a drawer opened. More elaborate antique furniture had highly decorative kinds of pulls, often in cast or worked in brass and sometimes in silver or porcelain especially if European. Depending on the width of a wooden drawer, a single knob or brass pull might suffice, but for long drawers, two places to grip were required to open a whole span without it getting stuck.

Many cabinets, armoires and secretaries, before WWI, avoided the issue of handles or pulls by locking with a metal key. Inserting a key and turning it served as a lever for opening a glass door or small drawer. Until modern times, the simplest and cheapest pulls were painted or stained wooden knobs, and these remained commonplace on kitchen and bathroom cabinets in most homes up past WWII. But on valuable chests intended for entries and parlors, one style of brass handle with an ornate backplate probably appeared in each room, and even was repeated throughout a home. Today, manufacturers of new drawer handles call those styles "traditional," and they differ surprisingly little from company to company, only by varying the name of the finishes offered.

Brass was the most common metal for American pulls prior to WWII, aside from wooden ones. Old brass can vary from highly polished to dark. While imported European chests might have brass pulls with elaborate worked designs on the backplates, most early American-made pulls were rather plain. Old chests generally had several drawers of different widths and lengths with an array of identical pulls. While long drawers require two handles to lever them open conveniently, and small drawers probably had just a single handle, their placement from the front usually had a symmetrical pattern. Formal symmetry was an expected attribute of good quality furniture in the distant past.

The decision to purchase a particular chest or set of cabinets today is often much affected by the appeal of the hardware. In the previous centuries, buyers didn't have much choice: with the exception of imported European furniture that very few could afford, a local cabinetmaker had limited access to pulls and probably used what was produced by the local ironmonger. Those who study old chests, desks and cabinets might find all the pieces made in a large geographic area shared the same kind of hardware. Indeed, hardware is one way to date very old furniture.

However, in the period right after WWII, there was an explosion in home construction across America (and other parts of the world), accompanied by expansion in the number of styles of hardware offered. And in recent decades, hardware makers have continued to add new styles annually to stay competitive. A century ago, when choosing a chest or cabinet, the hardware was probably a major consideration, and styles would stay much the same from room to room. Today, perhaps because spaces are much larger and certainly because attitudes differ, styles within a room can vary widely. But if you like antique wooden furniture, you may find you prefer antique pieces with hardware that is very much alike and that will live happily together.