How do furniture designers develop their style? As we saw in Jory Brigham's story, there are many long hours to be put in at the studio or shop, experimenting. But equally important is finding inspiration, understanding what came before, and letting these things marinate in your head.

To do that, it would be helpful to have a detailed catalog of furniture designs from over the centuries. Not just the Eameses and Le Corbusiers of the world, but lesser or completely unknown works that exceed the range of your average museum book or design history course. And a great place to find that stuff is at the furniture section of an auction site like LiveAuctioneers.

Because LiveAuctioneers spans 47 countries and "offers access to some items that have been in private collections for decades," you're guaranteed to find some stuff you've never seen before. You'll have to wade through some boring stuff, but finding the gems is worth it; most of the items you'll see are either expensive enough that they've been well-preserved for centuries, durable enough that they've survived long years of hard use, or recent and weird enough that people hung onto them.

In that latter category, check out these French wingback chairs from the '70s, designer unknown.

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When was the last time you saw subway-tiled leather strips?

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"[These] chairs represent the playful embellishment and radical experimentation of form in 1970s design," writes the site.

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Since the website is trying to sell these puppies to discerning collectors, the photos are often of fantastic quality and from multiple angles. Take this walnut dressing table, of the sort (if not style) that you'd see Lady Mary sitting at on Downton Abbey while Anna puts her necklaces on.

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Accurately-curved surfaces were of course difficult to execute in the 1800s via hand tools, and between that and the careful grain symmetry you can tell someone (or someones) slaved over this thing.

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The detailed photos are great. Here you can see, judging by the reveals, that the edges of the bottom base were veneered. (Perhaps the unknown 19th-Century craftsman who executed this steamed the parts in a plastic bag.)

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The upholstered silk footrest isn't exactly something you'd find on an Ikea desk.

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I was also surprised to see that the base was cut from a single piece (judging by the grain) and hollowed out—perhaps to reduce weight, or provide relief for wood movement.

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Half-blind dovetails on the drawers. Given that the fronts are curved, I wonder how the guy clamped them securely and still got a comfortable angle to chisel them at.

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And here's a great example of an early piece of modular storage furniture: One of the very first American card catalogs.

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The individual layers could be stacked, allowing the original buyer to purchase as many units as needed to achieve the desired capacity.

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Even without reading the date, we can see this piece predates the invention of plywood; the sides are frame-and-panel, with the floating panels designed to counter wood movement.

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Floating panels aside, the thing must be absurdly heavy, made as it is out of oak. That the stout legs have supported this nine-unit stack for at least 125 years is a testament to their build quality.

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As for how we arrived at that time span: While Globe-Wernicke was a well-known pioneer of card catalogs, they didn't gain that name until 1893; prior to that they were just the Globe Files Company out of Cincinnati. Here we can see the piece is simply badged "Globe," indicating this was a pre-merger design.

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At press time, the furniture section of LiveAuctioneers featured over 1,500 chairs, 1,300 tables, 500 cabinets, and another 1,000 sundry furniture items: Beds, dressers, desks, chests, sideboards, et cetera. Happy surfing.