I've gotten more interested in furniture recently and It's impossible to get far without constant references to Shaker furniture being the best. Even now Shaker style furniture seems to be extremely common.
I understand that they used high quality manufacturing methods like mortise and tenons to make very sturdy furniture and that they simple unadorned style is very elegant and timeless. However the skeptic in me doesn't think that sort of furniture can become so renowned without a large marketing campaign to support it and I doubt the shakers were behind that marketing.
So how did Shaker furniture get so popular? Was it just do to high quality or was there a marketing push as well?
This is basically a question of why a style became fashionable, and seeking deep reasons for a change in fashion is a little pointless. As the Romans would say, "de gustibus non disputandum est "- there's no arguing over taste. However, Shaker furniture had some qualities that made it fit in nicely with 20th c. tastes.
First, there was a general rejection of fake sentiment and excess emotion in much of art, and a similar rejection as well of heavy ornamentation common in the later 19th c. Clean lines, simpler profiles became more common in everything from trains to umbrellas.
There became also something of a market for higher-quality traditional furniture built with traditional joinery, a reaction against industrial mass-production. Some of that came in with the rage circa 1890 for everything Colonial, pushed by people like Wallace Nutting ( and lampooned in the show and film George Washington Slept Here) . As Herbert Cecsinsky noted in 1920, the amount of supposedly antique Chippendale furniture sold in the US far exceeded the amount the original Chippendale shop could have ever made. Colonial Williamsburg was founded, and not long after, Old Sturbridge Village, both initially with a heavy emphasis on material culture, furniture and furnishings.
So, if you combine that modern taste for simple, clean, unornamented and uncluttered spaces with the desire to recapture some of the earlier traditional American material culture, you can see why Shaker furniture would become popular. And though there is little ornament in Shaker designs ( they would have said absolutely none) there is excellent harmony of proportion. This is something quite common in 18th c. furniture that was often seriously neglected in 19th c. pieces ( like Wooton desks)
And the style became popular not just in America: though Danish makers would not just copy Shaker designs, their "Danish Modern" furniture was very much influenced by them. And though Shaker furniture is now popular, assumed to have honest, solid , traditional joinery, it's hard to say it's the only "gold standard". The market for large brown Colonial furniture has greatly diminished, but there are still fine makers of Windsor chairs and other 18th c. reproductions. There are also modern makers using traditional techniques with their own modern designs, like the "Krenovian" styles that came from the teaching of James Krenov in California. or the more free-flowing style of Sam Maloof.