Big as it is, the World's Largest Highboy is a mere entrance canopy for a sprawling furniture market.

World's Largest Highboy

Jamestown, North Carolina

Built in 1998 for a similarly immense furniture store, the World's Largest Highboy Chest stands 85 feet tall and 40 feet wide. Despite appearances, it was constructed not out of wood but of synthetic stucco over a steel frame. Its mastermind, the visionary Sid Lenger, cut his giant furniture teeth two years earlier when he'd built High Point's World's Largest Chest of Drawers.

World's Largest Highboy Chest as it appeared in 1999.

The chest of drawers in High Point is 47 feet shorter than the Highboy, so why isn't the Highboy also the World's Largest Chest of Drawers? The folks in High Point argue that the Highboy doesn't qualify because it's really just a three-sided canopy stuck onto the front of a much larger building, not a freestanding structure like the chest in High Point. We tend to agree as far as claims-to-fame go, although that doesn't lessen the jaw-dropping scale of the Highboy.

Sid Lenger's furniture trajectory seemed to have had no height barrier, and he might have gone on to build skyscraper-size dressers, bureaus, and wardrobes, but he died unexpectedly in 2003.

As customer furnishing tastes have evolved, the Highboy has undergone modest updating. The mahogany wood grain and color has shifted, and the hardware pulls have been changed from simulated antique brass to simulated satin nickel.