We're venturing into wild speculation territory here, but I suspect that there's a sort of sweet spot of specificity, between adding extraneous details and talking in terms so general that they're only useful for accounting headers or philosophy papers, and that the shortest nouns will fall into the center of it. "We need seventy pieces of furniture for the banquet" is a sentence I'd expect to come up less often than "we need sixty chairs and ten tables".

"Furniture" and "color" do show up in everyday conversation, but often in contexts like "what furniture needs repairs?" or "what color did you paint the kitchen?"