Throw out your grandfather clocks, the naysayers said, and banish your commodes to the scrapheap and junkshop. Brown furniture – invented in the Georgian and Regency eras and popularized for the mass market in the Victorian period – has been decreed by those tastemakers in the know to be as dead as Jacob Marley – a man who undoubtedly would have cherished those heavy mahogany bed frames and cabinets that were synonymous with his age – and showing even fewer signs of returning, even in spectral form.   The reasons for the apparent demise of brown furniture are less to do with a rejection of sturdy, well-built items that were once the pride and joy of any household and more because we are living smaller lives, in all senses.