Oeben worked for the aristocracy sometimes through intermediary marchands-merciers, providing extremely refined case furniture[1] with marquetry of flowers that gave way, in the last years of his career, to sober geometrical tiled patterns.

Not all of the furnishings for Mme de Pompadour had abandoned the rococo manner: at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a mechanical table stamped by Oeben and his brother-in-law R.V.L.C.

The known work of Oeben possesses genuine grace and beauty; as craftsmanship it is of the first rank, and it is typically French in its fluent, idiomatic character.

The Museu Calouste Gulbenkian has a mechanical table made by Oeben for the comte d'Argenson[4] which opens swing-away secretarial writing surfaces and a tilted reading easel with successive turns of a single key.

These, with a bureau and a chiffonier in the French national Garde Meuble, in which bouquets of flowers are delicately inlaid in choice woods, are his best-known and most admirable achievements.