Yes, you are both right, the architecture items are the earliest in the series. I have a better stone wall texture since, but I didn't remapped it yet. I moved on with the furniture since. Actually I draw a lot of inspiration from the Elder Scrolls series, especially the earlier daedric style, but had to rethink, since I didn't want my stuff to be too otherwordly. Yeah the Spiky throne just calls for an ambulace, but hey, it is still more safe than a Throne made entirely from swords, right?
About the bevels and custom normals: Blender has a cool little addon called Weight Normals, it works quite nicely, if I remember correctly, it creates custom normals depending on the size of a face, so if there is a tiny bevel on the side of a big fat quad, it will create the normals in favor of the bigger, smoother surface. I usually don't get to edit the normals manually, just fiddle around with the autosmooth angle to get it right. Bigger structures (like the columns edges) got baked from highpoly. Small details like the wood carvings got created from alphas in PS. The odd one out was the wardrobe, it's triangle pattern was baked from a beveled Bezier curve to try out how it will turn out.
And here comes this week's batch: