Multiple Taxonomy Question

Hello,

I am creating a site of products which will be assigned various taxonomy terms in order to classify them. For instance, I have products for furniture, lighting, rugs etc. Furniture will be broken down to have sub-categories such as beds, tables, chairs and so on lighting may have floor lamps, table lamps, wall sconces and others. In addition there may be other categories that apply to these products each with different terms based on the type of product.

Which is the best way to go about creating these products and assigning terms? Should I create different content types for each higher level product such as a "furniture" content type with an associated vocabulary such as "furniture type" with (beds, tables, chairs) and then create a "lighting" content type and associated vocabulary such as "lighting type" with its terms?

Or should I create a single content type such as "product" and then have a combined type vocabulary that is hierarchical and contains all the terms for a product type such as:

Furniture
- Beds
- Tables
- Chairs
- so on
Lighting
- Floor lamps
- Table lamps
- Wall sconces
- so on

I may also have additional vocabularies as mentioned, some with terms that only apply to certain type of products. Again, if I create separate content types for each main product, then it's easy to assign vocabularies to it. If there is one single product content type then there would be taxonomy choices on the node create screen that may not apply to a particular product. I guess these would just be set as "not required" to solve that problem.

What would really be great is if there was a way to conditionally load the correct terms on the node add page based on other terms. For instance, if I selected "Furniture" as a top category, then the "Type" category dropdown would be filled with Beds, Tables, Chairs and if I chose "Lighting" from the top category, it would fill the appropriate terms associated with that.

Hope this all makes sense. It seems there are many ways to handle building nodes and assigning terms but which method is correct is what I don't know. In the end, my plan is to be able to filter the product results in a view using exposed filters based on these various terms.

Thanks in advance for any advice!