This is True Arts and Crafts
It’s been years since I went antiquing in Essex. That’s the old ship-building town next to Gloucester, which is incidentally famous for a cluster of antiques stores…
A Note from the Editor:
It’s been years since I went antiquing in Essex. That’s the old ship-building town next to Gloucester, which is incidentally famous for a cluster of antiques stores, most of them right on the Essex River and close by Woodman’s eat-in-the-raw lobster and clambake establishment. Going to Essex was a highlight of my early trips to Cape Ann, but I’ve been a local for twenty years and I haven’t needed furniture lately. Then last week I decided to look for a big oak bookcase, to hold two hundred books I’m bringing home from the office.
In the shops, lots of things are labeled Mission, shorthand for oak, Arts & Crafts, or overpriced. Some of these pieces are Grand Rapids production furniture. Some looked like high-school shop projects. I saw a few English pieces and a notable Mission Oak desk with its original finish. I did find the right bookcase—A&C period but not collectible, credibly beat-up, open shelves—but the proprietor said it was not for sale; she didn’t want to move the books in it. She suggested a place up the road, which I knew specialized in early furniture, but I went anyway.
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A few antique chairs, tagged for sale, sat in the stony courtyard, but the majority of pieces in this store were new work: artful tables made up from old boards and even wainscot and doors, and chairs in the Windsor tradition. My eyes went immediately to a bow-back chair finished in red milk paint, its extraordinarily fine, knife-edge seat obviously sculpted by hand. The chair’s delicate proportions bely the strength inherent in its springy spindles and tight joints. It was made by a man who uncompromisingly crafts one chair at a time.
Like the Sussex chairs so popular during the English Arts & Crafts movement, and the design for the original "Morris chair” found in a country woodshop, that red chair is true Arts & Crafts.
Patricia Poore,Editor
letters @artsandcraftshomes.com
108 East Main St., Gloucester, MA 01930
Patricia Poore is Editor-in-chief of Old House Journal and Arts & Crafts Homes, as well as editorial director at Active Interest Media’s Home Group, overseeing New Old House, Traditional Building, and special-interest publications.
Poore joined Old House Journal when it was a Brooklyn-brownstoner newsletter in the late 1970s. She became owner and publisher and, except for the years 2002–2013, has been its editor. Poore founded the magazines Old-House Interiors (1995–2013) and Early Homes (2004–2017); their content is now available online and folded into Old-House Journal’s wider coverage. Poore also created GARBAGE magazine (1989–1994), the first unaffiliated environmental consumer magazine.
Poore has participated, hands-on, in several restorations, including her own homes: a 1911 brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and a 1904 Tudor–Shingle Style house in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she brought up her boys and their wonderful dogs.
