Nearly three hundred designs on 128 plates for every piece of household furniture, in the light, straight, delicately inlaid manner that followed Adam’s: shield and oval-backed chairs, sofas, sideboards with their pedestals and vases, Pembroke and card tables, beds and their hangings, with the general dimensions of each kind.
George Hepplewhite (d. 1786) kept a cabinet-making business in London; the Guide was published by his widow Alice two years after his death. Its aim, it says, was to unite elegance and utility, and its designs carried the Adam manner from the great houses into ordinary ones.
The Guide gives the general sizes of each piece: a chair 20 inches wide in front, the seat 17 inches deep and 17 high, the back about 3 feet 1 inch; a sofa 6 to 7 feet long and about 30 inches deep; a sideboard 5½ to 7 feet long, 3 feet high and 28 to 32 inches wide; and it describes how the dining room of a large house sets a pedestal with a vase at each end of the sideboard.