adjective
- noting or pertaining to a style of furnishings common in German-speaking areas in the early to middle 19th century, generally existing as a simplification of the French Directoire and Empire styles, usually executed in fruitwood with much use of matched veneers, and often displaying architectural motifs.
adjective
- of or relating to a decorative and furnishing style in mid-19th-century Germany, characterized by solidity and conventionality
- boringly conventional in outlook; bourgeois
1854, from German, from Gottlieb Biedermeier, name of a fictitious writer of stodgy poems (invented by Ludwig Eichrodt as a satire on bourgeois taste); the name generally applied to styles prevalent in Germany 1815-48; also “conventional, bourgeois.”