I can say good things about our Baker, Kindel, and Stickley purchases (no surprises there) and about MGBW.

I would echo what KSWL said. Moreover, I generally find that I am drawn to a particular piece or style, and the manufacturer is somewhat secondary. Generally, in new furniture, you get what you pay for (or less). There are no bargains for good quality, and there is a fair amount of overpriced stuff that has appealing and or trendy design and only fair quality.

If you like traditional furniture, I find that used/vintage/antique is often more interesting, better value and better made.

I have had good experience with Smith Brothers of Berne (Indiana) - I think that is different than Smith Brothers. I have had an upholstered couch and rocker for nearly 10 years that is still wonderful. We have had two leather recliners for 5 years that are awesome too. Their frames and cushions are lifetime (I believe) warrantied. We haven't had a problem with anything. They have thousands of fabrics to choose from. We are a fairly busy house with grown kids who are over often, grandkids (ranging from 2-9) and 3 dogs. At one time we had 3 dogs and 3 cats and 1 or 2 foster dogs. Although dogs are all Chihuahuas, so little, everyone is welcome on the furniture.

I have a Hancock and Moore leather Chesterfield sofa, and a leather office chair by them. Both are wonderful pieces that will last me many years.

Are you ruling out veneer because you don't want any of the styles that require it?

I've had good experiences with the two pieces of Harden that I have.

Our bed is Bernhardt, and I love it. Two of our sofas and a club chair were Drexel Heritage (actually, I think one of the sofas is a Heritage, before they merged.) We bought the one sofa and club chair when we were first married, 20 years ago! Both have been recovered numerous times (the club chair would qualify as an archeology site...I keep moving it around from room to room & changing it. Both have cushions re-stuffed and such...but the frames have held up so well! I really haven't seen anything new that seems as good quality wise so I will just keep them.

We have personally in our home: Baker, Drexel Heritage, Sherrill, Taylor King, Bernhardt, Stanley, Ethan Allen and Thomasville. If I could afford it I would love all Baker furniture but their prices have gotten crazy. I am very impressed with Taylor King for upholstery and Ethan Allen makes good upholstery too but their styles are just a little off for my needs. My Drexel Heritage bedroom furniture is 25 years old and still in perfect condition but many companies now outsource to China or somewhere else and not the same as back in the day. I agree if you can find second hand good furniture it is the way to go. All of my knowledge is from my furniture that is several years old now and it seems things have changed drastically just in the past few years where furniture is concerned. The above listed names that I have personally are still ok as far as I know. I am most wary of upholstery holding up these days with all the new regs making foam and fabric less durable, it's a challenge to find good quality anything.

We also have a Broyhill Premiere sofa that is 27 years old and looks brand new except for where my dog chewed the upholstered arm and there is a small hole there. But the cushions are still nice and comfortable, do not sag, the welting is still where it is supposed to be. Broyhill's Premiere line was top o' the line in it's day but the Broyhill Premiere category is not made anymore to my knowledge. I noticed on ebay that Premiere is sought after as vintage.

As far as case goods go, I am not as picky about those as I am upholstery. I don't need every end table or accent piece to be top of the line but upholstery is where the rubber meets the road and is the difference between junk and long lasting comfortable furniture that will stay looking great for many years. I would still put money into hard working dining chairs and the table and good upholstery throughout but the rest of the furniture I would be willing to pick up anywhere I could find a good deal. Many things are just filler pieces and don't need to be heirloom quality and I often have bought used furniture at consignment or antique stores that is better than any new cheap furniture. What I have found hard is replacing the old reliable craftsmen that are retired now since I last had re-upholstering done awhile back. It's hard to get the same good results at a decent price when updating your existing furniture. Labor to redo a sofa is getting crazy. Add to that the cost of fabric has skyrocketed and then you still don't know if these new upholsterers will do the same high quality job that their predecessors did and it's a gamble. That is where I am now. My dear and faithful upholsterers are now elderly and retired or gone to the great beyond and the ones that took their place are not the same. Ditto for our once trusted manufacturers. Things have changed, that's for sure.

Commenting on this list is like asking someone to evaluate the entire home furnishings market. Lee makes furniture for Crate and Barrel and others. They are an affordable manufacturer of high medium-range furniture.

Rose Tarlow is custom and mostly casegoods that are copies of vintage and antiques at almost the same prices.

Holly Hunt is a collection -- not a manufacturer and has a wide variety of high end furniture.

I think I understand your intention. You want to be sure of what you would be buying, right? But you've got fruit cocktail in that list, not just apples.

"I don't want to replace pieces, perhaps just recover them or refinish as needed over our lifetime due to wear."

Re your statement above: have a Donghia settee I purchased as a living room piece for my then
studio apartment in 1972 when Angelo Donghia was alive. It was made by a
custom house in NY and even though it's only 5-feet long, it's almost
too heavy for 2 men to carry. IOW it's an excellent piece of furniture. When I go, our dd will likely donate it unless she decides to redo it for one of the kids rooms or the guest house as I will never give it up. It is so well made it could easily last a century.

It's been recovered 3 times over the years. It has a down cushion which
has been refilled twice. It hasn't had daily use as it became a bedroom
sofa. No sofa could give better service. However, I would not buy an
upholstered piece from Donghia today because they have basically become a
fabric house.

Over the years, I have found that no matter what I buy, I need to redo most upholstery approximately every 10 to 15 years due to daily wear and a need to update. You can stretch it to 20 but that's stretching it. F.ex. I have Crate and Barrel furniture purchased 8 years ago for our weekend house. The sofa is kiln-dried hardwood but is lightweight (not good but not expensive). The linen fabric is wearing through on the edges of the cushion and I've had to put foam on the deck under the slipcover to keep it comfortable. Two years from now, we'll need to junk it or recover. 10 years. Had I bought a Baker sofa, f.ex., I would have had slightly better quality at three times the price. Even if I junk the current sofa and replace, I'd likely be spending less overall than having gone high end.

Upholstered furniture loses value faster than anything else I can compare it to. The best buys (and you need to be careful these days) are upholstered things at auctions. I've seen super high end sofas that cost a fortune originally go for under $1000. Then recover.

Alternately, find a friend with access to a design center
near where you live. Take 3 or 4 days and tour it, notebook in hand. You
will quickly see what you like. Then ask about the quality of those brands.

Case pieces (wood furniture) from various brands does not hold its value and I cannot see spending the same price for something new over something older with higher quality materials. I don't buy new case pieces ever. I only buy vintage or old. For our guest room I needed a chest of drawers. A new one would be at close to $1000 even from a catalog (unless it's made in China which you clearly don't want). I got a solid mahogany 6-drawer chest with gorgeous brass Aesthetic period hardware (turn of the 19th/20th century) for $500 at an auction including the buyer's premium.

Thanks so much for all the replies so far... I knew the list was too long and somewhat messy since some of the listings with someone's name may be people/designers who have contracted with another manufacturer to produce a line with their "brand/name" stamped on it instead... but when I posted on the furniture forum I didn't get many responses when just asking for quality, so I thought it might help to have a list to jog some responses. Reviews mean a lot to me when making purchasing decisions, and I am coming at the upholstered world with very little knowledge. A few years ago after a lot of research back then, I purchased our first two pieces of upholstered furniture that were not "hand-me-downs" or cheap college purchases, and I went with Lee Industries. Unfortunately I think we only sat on that sofa and beautiful chair two times before we found out my husband's job required a major move, and since we had purchased them during a promotion, we were able to get most of our money out of them through Craigslist, which was better than paying mover's to transport our things and pay for storage since we'd be landing in a partially-furnished rental for the first year. Since then I have read a lot of conflicting Lee reviews, including on GW/nowHouzz, and so it feels like starting over, but I'm still leaning that way. I tend to like to spend money on experiences vs. things, so I really want to get as many decades out of our furniture purchases as possible, even if paying a little more on the front end for quality to make that happen. Though a poster above was spot on - they just don't make 'em today like they used to, do they... I wish they did! My favorite chair in our house is from my husband's 87-ish year-old-grandmother, and it was second-hand when she bought it many years ago, so I guess it's third-hand by now. There are a few stains, but it sits perfectly, and I would never recover the embroidered linen on it unless it wears through - I can't even imagine what that kind of fabric would cost today.

Re: case goods... I know my standards on that front are only because my parents own a small mom-and-pop store in the Midwest that sells solid wood case goods, mostly Amish-made. While it isn't all my style, that is how we ended up with hand-me-downs, and so over the years my Dad has drilled into me to look for solid-built, solid wood quality. If not for the family discount on that front, my preferences might be different. To answer the question above about veneer - the reason why I excluded veneer is because they don't carry anything with particle board or veneer, but I also want to avoid veneer because in our current rental, two side tables that are not ours have nicks through the veneer that reveal the mdf or particle board underneath, and they just aren't wearing like the the 10+ year old coffee table we got from my parents, which still looks pretty perfect. Our pedestal breakfast table is the same one I sat at for dinner each night as a child, and other than the fact that it has been refinished once and that oak is currently off-trend, it looks pretty indestructible. I wouldn't pick the oak today, but the table has a nostalgia that will keep it with us. I hope to update the look a bit with upholstered chairs around it.

If I could edit the thread list down after the fact, I would, but unfortunately it looks like the time window for changes has passed. Thanks again for all the reviews so far, it really helps to know what has worn well and what to look for... sounds like I may need to start looking at some estate sales and craiglist ads too...

One of the things that I found difficult to answer about this question is that you can only answer it in retrospect because the furniture has to prove itself over the years. I am taking a good bit of the Baker, Henredon, Kindel, Milling Road, Sherrill, etc. out of my parents' house and it's all either 46 or 40 years old, and I have Stickley that's almost 20 and it's all lasted and all in very good condition, but I can't conjecture how a piece you buy now will perform in comparison. I don't feel like some of the finishes are comparable now to the older finishes, and of a few of the makers on your list and one on mine, I no longer like the style of the furniture they make compared to years past.

Just had some family members over for dinner tonight, including a 5 year old, who was jumping and climbing on his mother/mother's dining room chair. Baker Queen Anne chairs now about 45 years old. I commented how these chairs are like rocks: not a squeak or a shimmy in these pieces. And they have been used daily, and energetically, for all those years. The table needs refinishing, but also solid as a rock. Once, when I was going to be away for a year, I rented my house. I remember that the movers wanted to remove the legs. They were stunned that you couldn't remove them (without a chainsaw!); that they were one piece with the rest of the table. That's the kind of construction that holds up indefinitely.

15 years ago (that's about how old this picture is hence the dated decor) I shopped for a bedroom set. I found Kincaid to be very nice and very sturdy and it still is.

I found the set (bed and frame, 2 bachelor chests, dresser, armoire) locally for $10,373.00; I ended up getting it for $5,804 from Furniture Land South.

If you are into contemporary midcentury modern furniture, I am having really good luck with a couple chair pieces made by dwr. Also, I have heard good things about thayer coggin (I just got a new t.c. chair, but it's too new to judge -looks beautiful though). Also, I have heard good things about knoll and herman miller.

Building,

Purchased 2 Wesley Hall leather chairs and an ottoman in 2007. Not eons ago. They've aged beautifully in both structure and upholstery. Would purchase again.

Also have 3 upholstery pieces from Smith Brothers of Berne which were purchased in 2012 and 2014. Nuff said.

Have a standard Stickley sideboard which was a 2010 purchase. I still admire the detail of the quartersawn oak.

Other than design/decor changes, IMO, you can't go wrong with quality.

~bgj

I don't see Room and Board on your list. The majority, if not all, of their furniture is sourced in the U.S. We have a 15+ yo bedroom set that is still going strong. Solid wood. We also have media pieces and bookshelves that have stood the test of time both for quality and style. My favorite furniture store by far!