1. Old well built furniture is _heavy_. This goes from being an asset to a liability if you're moving reasonably often.
2. Furniture tastes among the middle class changed dramatically sometime after maybe 1980? A large ornate wooden cabinet that would've been 'normal' if a little old fashioned any time from the 1880s to the 1970s suddenly looked terribly mismatched in a room full of minimalist white and light wood items. The later success of IKEA and chains like Crate & Barrel only accelerated this.
My grandfather had an old dresser that was so heavy that me and another big dude couldn't pick it up. It was on the second floor and measuring the stairwell we realized we could not get it down. It was assembled with complex wood joinery and barely any screws were visible. Wound up having to smash it to pieces with a sledge hammer which mostly bounced off of it. We felt so bad having to do that but the house was being sold and no way was that thing was going down stairs. That thing was incredibly well built.
Compare that to a shitty particleboard Ikea book case I got 2nd hand from a friend where upon assembly a shelf fell and smashed every other shelf going down tearing the pegs from the particleboard essentially self destructing. Took me hours to glue it back together. Light though.
Modern solid-wood furniture makes use of lighter materials too. Sometimes the backboard will be thin particle board, or certain planks will be pretty thin. Or the drawers are made of much lighter wood, possibly veneered. Also, the designs are much less ornate.
So in general, your modern solid wood furniture AND cheap, flatpack stuff will be lighter that old well-built furniture.
This is true—an IKEA Billy, say, is really heavy for the volume of material involved (compared with the same amount of oak, for example) but is designed for cheap + packs-flat, not to minimize weight. It does win on size and stackability, when disassembled.
1. Old well built furniture is _heavy_. This goes from being an asset to a liability if you're moving reasonably often.
2. Furniture tastes among the middle class changed dramatically sometime after maybe 1980? A large ornate wooden cabinet that would've been 'normal' if a little old fashioned any time from the 1880s to the 1970s suddenly looked terribly mismatched in a room full of minimalist white and light wood items. The later success of IKEA and chains like Crate & Barrel only accelerated this.