lathework

Indeed, he uses his reportorial talent for description to conjure the glum, shopworn world they inhabit: he notices the linoleum curling at its seams, the fake antique furniture “broken out in pediments and lathework grenades and ornamental buboes,” the old sewing machine “whose plastic had gone yellow.”

2009 March 24, Michiko Kakutani, “Land of Promise, Home of the Bedeviled and Bewildered”, in New York Times