The last time I went into an Ethan Allen (with a girlfriend that wanted nice new furniture), I noted that a lot of their furniture is at least partially made of particle board. I was astounded...they aren't super expensive, as furniture goes, but they aren't cheap either. My mom is an antique dealer, so I grew up around good furniture, and the notion that anyone would pay money (any money at all) for furniture that's made to be disposable is difficult to comprehend for me.
The reasons for buying new furniture are even fewer now that the market for antiques has tanked. My mom still has a couple of booths in antique malls and she makes money at it, but nothing like she used to, and she's mostly pivoted from a focus on furniture to glassware and smaller collectibles. The shift is partly because she's older and can't handled bigger items, anymore, especially without my dad to help, but also because the market for antique furniture isn't what it used to be. People are a lot more likely to have space for a nice piece of glassware than for an armoire or buffet table.
You can buy great old or antique furniture for less than new, and it'll be better made, it'll age better, and it'll hold its value better (it probably won't really go up in value, like antiques once did, but it likely won't drop too much either, whereas new particle board furniture is absolutely going in the trash or by the road in ten years).
If price isn't a major concern (i.e. you're willing to pay prices only slightly lower than new furniture prices for antique and older furniture from the era when it was all made of real hard woods), and want to just buy something good quickly, antique malls are a great choice. This will be retail prices, which is at the high end of the old furniture pricing scale, but you can walk around and see dozens or hundreds of pieces in an afternoon of shopping. Also, most of the time, the items will be in good usable condition right off the floor; my mom, when she dealt mostly with furniture, would restore/refinish/re-upholster anything that needed attention before she put it in her booth (as long as that attention wouldn't hurt the value, by stripping away something intrinsically interesting about the piece). You can also often get a small (10-15%) discount just by asking. You can make offers, but they'll have to call the owner of the item to make any sale that isn't pre-arranged (my mom, I think, has a standing instruction with the folks who run the antique malls where she sells to allow a 10% discount if the person is buying with cash right then, repeat customers may have even better deals available to them).
If you want to get a bargain and can invest time, my mom buys at garage sales, flea markets, thrift stores, and auctions, in that order (with garage sales being, by far, the best place to get good prices, but also the most time-intensive). Estate sales (a sale after someone has died and their entire house is being emptied out for sale) in old neighborhoods are the best option for finding antiques and old furniture. But, these days, even estate sales may have no good furniture. The first generation to start buying mass-produced trash furniture is now beginning to be among the folks dying and leaving an estate to be dealt with by their family.
There are also often antique expos in most major cities, where lots of dealers come from surrounding cities to sell; happens a couple times a year, generally. Again, this will be retail prices and maybe even higher, but you have a lot to choose from. If you're looking for stuff that doesn't sell well, you can drop in at the end of the last day and make offers on stuff you like...they don't want to load it up and carry it back home, so they'll let it go for a song. As recently as a decade ago, I was able to buy some really nice Mid-Century Modern stuff at a good price this way (good enough that I made a modest profit when I moved a couple years later and sold those pieces on craisglist).
But, I usually buy on Craigslist. It allows me to setup searches for specific items I want, and I can make offers when things come up that I like, even if the price isn't quite right. People on craisglist may or may not know the right price for something, and often just want it gone. For mass-produced stuff, you can often figure out what the right price is by searching on eBay for recent "Sold" listings. This is not as cheap as garage sale prices can be, and if there is a bargain you have to jump on it immediately, but you don't have to invest a lot of time or wake up at the butt crack of dawn to find good stuff at fair prices.
Unfortunately, craigslist is in decline, so you also may want to check Facebook marketplace (which is a usability trash fire, and I hate it, but lots of people use it). It's nowhere near as usable, in terms of saving searches and getting notifications about stuff you might want, and it doesn't really have good filters like craigslist.
Speaking of getting deals, when you're in the market for stuff like this, carry a nice chunk of cash with you everywhere. Paying cash can get you discounts with a lot of the folks who sell antiques. They aren't often technically savvy, and their credit card fees are often very high (like 3-5%, and the venue they sell in may even add some extras on top for card transactions). And, while most professionals in the business are keeping good records and paying taxes on everything (and malls definitely are), a lot of people for whom antiques and collectibles is a side hustle, as you find at flea markets and expo events, will be happy to have some money that's not on the books.
Also note that it doesn't have to be an antique to be great furniture. Quality, solid hardwood furniture was being made for the mass market, and is thus widely available on the used market, well into the 70s (though particle board began being used sometime in the 40s and 50s, in limited amounts). Depending on your style preference, you may find furniture that is merely "old" rather than antique, but that is still something you'll love.
I enjoy mid-century modern furniture, for example, though because it has become trendy in the past decade, it's no longer as much of a bargain as it used to be (this is another trend my mom has noticed...the era of stuff people are still buying has shifted forward in time, I guess to whatever people's parents and grandparents had in their houses when they were growing up, so it's what has nostalgic value for them, 30-somethings furnishing their houses probably spent their early formative years in mid-century modern furnished houses). But, I also really enjoy the era before that...1900s through the 1940s was an excellent era in American furniture, if you don't want to spend a lot of money. It was beginning to be machine-manufactured, so there's a lot of it out there, and it was made from our vast hardwood forests that had yet to be depleted. And, I tend to prefer simple, utilitarian, American styles over more ornate older European inspired styles, which used to be a good thing when hunting for bargains, but now it's among the stronger periods and styles (while others, like French antiques, have tanked in value a lot, newer American eras and styles have held pretty firm...partly that's also because American styles and newer eras just didn't have far to fall, as they were cheap to start with).
I think you are appreciating arts and crafts / craftsman furniture, a movement which did originate in Europe (well, uk) that was a reaction against unnecesssry ornamentation and was also guided by / a movement for the politics of work. Very very sturdy and bombproof designs. Not my bag, but some folks love it.
Yes, Craftsman stuff is great, and I like Shaker furniture styles, as well, which is similarly simple/utilitarian, but has its own characteristics. All of my favorite stuff I've owned has been from American makers. Not surprising since I'm cheap and live in America, so the good stuff that's widely available enough to be cheap is American.
"Bombproof" seems like it would imply heaviness or blockiness, which isn't among the characteristics of the pieces I like. There's actually a certain delicacy and balance that is the defining characteristic of the pieces I like (though there are some clunky pieces, as well). I like the feeling that the piece has exactly the right number of pieces made of exactly the right amount of wood and at a human scale (i.e. not large, the way a lot of "expensive" furniture is). I also like the wood choices...oak is super common for these styles from these eras, and when it's 100 years old it weighs almost nothing while still being incredibly strong. It's a perfect balance of things I like in furniture.
Do you think being made of particleboard means furniture is made to be disposable?
In my experience, particleboard furniture can be of pretty good quality - often better than low-end solid wood furniture, as particleboard is free of warping and knots.
Whether intentional or not, it is just a basic fact that particle board wears extremely poorly. If it gets damp, it expands and warps and veneers lift up and crack, if the veneer gets scratched deeply enough to expose the particle board, you generally can't sand it and refinish it. Corners get banged up, exposing the particle board beneath, which is then more subject to wear and moisture, accelerating the process that leads to the piece ending up on the curb.
Particle board furniture also weighs more than furniture made of real hardwoods, often a lot more. Making it harder to take with you when you move, and harder to sell used. Particle board doesn't handle being taken apart and put back together (e.g. taking legs off of something to get it through a door) as well as real wood does.
There are several good reasons furniture is made of particle board today (primarily that humanity chewed through the world's old growth hardwoods over the past couple of centuries, and it'll take more than a few of our lifetimes for them to return if humanity survives long enough to figure out how to be responsible stewards of forests), but there aren't any reasons for consumers to prefer particle board over hardwood furniture from the past, especially when real hardwood furniture from the past is cheaper than new particle board furniture.
Let's just say that I've seen a lot of furniture in my life and I have never seen an old (i.e. mid-century, when it began to be a thing manufacturers toyed with) piece of predominantly particle board furniture that I'd want in my house, have you? I have, on the other hand, seen and owned pieces of hardwood furniture that were still beautiful and functional at well over a hundred years old (you can find older than that, too, but, at least in the US, you'll find that even in this poor antiques market they're likely more expensive than similar new furniture).
I personally won't own particle board furniture. I won't buy it from Ikea (technological and logistical marvel it may be, good furniture it is not), or from Ethan Allen, or anyone else, no matter how beautiful it looks on the showroom floor. Because, I know that in a few years, it will look much worse than a good piece of hardwood furniture. And, I'll probably have needed to move it at least once, and it really is often stupidly heavy.
The guitar market is dealing with this problem, too. Moving to other woods that aren't quite as difficult/expensive to come by. And, they're even beginning to use artificial woods.
I have an old hardwood floor. We were getting some work done and I asked for some ex demolition flooring to be put in. It was, and looks good but it had no nail holes and I asked about this. It turned out it was new and was wood helicoptered out after a big storm.
I wasn’t that happy as newish wood still shrinks, isn’t as hard and is a bit lighter in colour, quite apart from the dubious method of acquisition.
This is a really important point. Something may look really slick and nice now, but how is it going to look as it ages? Old wood, brick, stone, stucco, age very nicely. Old plastic and particle board, not so much.
