lowboy
lowboy
American English
“The companion piece to the highboy was designed for one specific task: sitting at it to look in a mirror and arrange your hair, in an era when that took an hour.”
Lowboy is the counterpart to 'highboy,' appearing in American English around the same time, in the late seventeenth century. The word is another mysterious -boy compound with no satisfying etymology. A lowboy is a small table with drawers, usually with cabriole legs, standing about thirty inches tall — waist height when seated. It was a dressing table, designed to be used with a mirror propped or hung above it.
The lowboy served a specific social function. In the eighteenth century, preparing one's appearance was a complex daily ritual. Wigs were powdered, faces were rouged, patches were applied. The drawers of a lowboy held combs, pins, powder, pomade, and other grooming tools. The flat top held a mirror and candles. The furniture was intimate — it was where you made yourself presentable before entering the social world.
Like the highboy, the lowboy reached its artistic peak in Philadelphia. The same cabinetmakers who produced towering highboys made matching lowboys with identical carved details, leg profiles, and wood choices. The two pieces were often sold as a suite — the highboy for clothing storage, the lowboy for grooming. Together, they furnished a complete bedroom before built-in closets and bathroom vanities existed.
The lowboy lost its function as bathrooms acquired mirrors and built-in storage. The small table with drawers persists in some bedrooms as a nightstand or side table, but it is no longer called a lowboy unless it is an antique. The word, like the furniture, belongs to a period when getting dressed was an event that required dedicated equipment.
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Today
A matched Philadelphia highboy-and-lowboy pair in good condition can sell for over a million dollars at auction. The lowboy alone, being smaller and less visually dramatic, commands less than its taller companion. The word survives only in the vocabulary of antique dealers and museum curators.
The lowboy was furniture for a world that moved slowly. Getting dressed took time. Grooming was ritual. The small table with its drawers of combs and powder served an hour-long process. Now the process takes minutes and happens in a bathroom. The furniture stayed behind in the eighteenth century. The word stayed with it.
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