The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fumed oak \Fumed oak\ (Cabinetwork) Oak given a weathered appearance by exposure in an air-tight compartment to fumes of ammonia from uncorked cans, being first given a coat of filler.
Wiktionary
n. oak that has been exposed to ammonia fumes to darken its color.
WordNet
n. oak given a weathered appearance by exposure to fumes of ammonia; used for cabinetwork
Wikipedia
Fumed Oak is a short play in two scenes by Noël Coward, one of ten that make up Tonight at 8:30, a cycle written to be performed across three evenings. Coward billed the work as an "unpleasant comedy in two scenes". The play concerns a downtrodden, middle-aged salesman who, having saved up enough money to cut all ties, walks out on his wife, mother-in-law and "horrible adenoidal daughter", having first told all three what he thinks of them.
In the introduction to a published edition of the plays, Coward wrote, "A short play, having a great advantage over a long one in that it can sustain a mood without technical creaking or over padding, deserves a better fate, and if, by careful writing, acting and producing I can do a little towards reinstating it in its rightful pride, I shall have achieved one of my more sentimental ambitions."
The play was first produced in 1935 in Manchester and on tour and played in London (1936), New York (1936–1937) and Canada (1938). It has enjoyed several major revivals and has been adapted for film. At its premières in Manchester and London Fumed Oak was played on the same evening as Hands Across the Sea and Shadow Play. Like all the other plays in the cycle it originally starred Gertrude Lawrence and Coward himself.
Coward later said, "I have always had a reputation for high-life, earned no doubt in the twenties with such plays as The Vortex. But, as you see, I was a suburban boy, born and bred in the suburbs of London, which I've always loved and always will." Fumed Oak, like his later play This Happy Breed, is one of his rare stage depictions of suburban life.
Usage examples of "fumed oak".
Nestled in the center of the stone vines was a large, round-topped, fumed oak door.
They had grown even more clannish in the generation since, which showed in the tall ceramic steins along the walls, plastic wainscoting that made a valiant attempt to imitate fumed oak, and a human bartender in wooden shoes, lederhosen, and a beard clipped closer on one side than the other.
The furniture was Thane, massive, the fumed oak frames thickly covered in carving.
The reason he noticed the spartan simplicity of the BOQ, he realized, was that forty-five minutes earlier, he had walked down a carpeted corridor illuminated by crystal chandeliers to an elevator paneled in what for some strange reason he had recognized as fumed oak, and then across carpets laid on a marble floor past genuine antiques to a gleaming brass-and-glass revolving door spun by a doorman in what looked to be the uniform of an admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy.
Gloria had probably given it a family history, and comfortably forgotten the mission-style fumed oak back home.