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AIR
Indoor air is often more polluted than the air just outside it, and furniture is one of the more overlooked reasons why. Paints, stains, adhesives, and the resins used in manufactured wood products all release volatile organic compounds, gasses that evaporate slowly into the air of a room. Living around them has been linked to headaches and irritation of the eyes and throat, with more persistent respiratory effects showing up under longer exposure. Formaldehyde is worth knowing by name, since it's the most closely regulated of these compounds: it's what binds particleboard and MDF together in the urea-based resins used to make them, which is why the EPA regulates composite wood products specifically rather than furniture as a whole.
WHAT AIR DOES
Timing turns out to matter more than almost anything else. A finish or an adhesive releases the largest share of its compounds when it's newly applied, and that release tapers off gradually as the material finishes curing, sometimes over a long stretch of time. This is where old and new furniture quietly part ways: a piece built decades ago, finished long before it ever entered a home, has already done most of its off-gassing and settled into the room around it. A newly manufactured piece, built from engineered wood and sealed with a fresh finish, is often still in the middle of that process, and it's doing it inside a home that tends to be more tightly sealed than the one the older piece originally cured in, which can concentrate what it releases rather than let it dissipate.
OLD WOOD, NEW WOOD
Age alone doesn't settle the question, though. Finishes and adhesives vary widely regardless of when a piece was made, and solid wood without a composite core or synthetic lacquer avoids most of this at any age. A piece refinished with a slow-curing natural oil or wax behaves very differently, over time, than one sprayed with a synthetic lacquer, even if the two look nearly identical on the day they're finished. This is part of why a transformation takes the time it does here: choosing what a piece is finished with isn't only a question of appearance, it's a question of what a room will actually be breathing for years afterward, long after the piece itself has stopped smelling like anything new at all.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR A PIECE