A Who’s Who of Arts & Crafts

HARVEY ELLIS (1852–1904) The architect and renderer had a profound effect on Stickley’s Craftsman designs during his short tenure with the company, introducing lighter, tapered elements reflective of English and Glaswegian designers, including delicate furniture inlays.

GREENE & GREENE Best known for their “ultimate bungalows” in Pasadena (1907–1909), the architect brothers are lauded for those finely detailed residences featuring chalet forms and Japanese-derived woodwork—a collaboration with craftsmen brothers Peter and John Hall.

ELBERT HUBBARD (1856–1915) Founder of the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, the writer–philosopher and artist also published two magazines and several popular books. Hubbard’s son operated the Roycroft shops until 1938, after the senior Elbert and his wife, Alice, died aboard the Lusitania. The campus since has been revived, along with a Roycroft Renaissance guild of craftspeople.

CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH (1868–1928) The Scots architect and watercolorist designed proto-Modern buildings featuring strong geometry; he collaborated with his wife the artist Margaret Macdonald on unique interiors for which they designed decoration, furniture, metalwork, and textiles. The two were leaders among a talented group of designers and artists in Glasgow, creating a style that influenced the European Art Nouveau and Secession movements.

JULIA MORGAN (1872–1957) Famous for her collaborations with William Randolph Hearst (she designed the castle at San Simeon), Morgan was the first woman licensed as an architect in California. As both architect and engineer, she designed more than 700 buildings, many in the Arts & Crafts idiom, and she was a pioneer in the aesthetic use of reinforced concrete.

WILLIAM MORRIS (1834–1896) The British medievalist, designer, poet and novelist, and socialist activist is known as the father of the Arts & Crafts movement. His research and hands-on artisanry revived traditional textile art and dyes; he designed tapestries, wallpapers, fabrics, furniture, and stained glass. Morris’s own neo-Gothic yet modern Red House (1859), the result of collaboration with architect Philip Webb, is considered to be the first Arts & Crafts house. Morris & Co. brought Arts & Crafts design to a broad audience; many designs are still in production.

GUSTAV STICKLEY (1858–1942) was a furniture maker who became the chief proponent of the American Arts & Crafts movement through his influential magazine The Craftsman. He adopted factory techniques to make what was essentially handcrafted furniture affordable; his enterprise published house plans for Craftsman Homes. His brothers were also furniture makers; the former L. & J.G. Stickley company remains in business as Stickley.

DIRK VAN ERP (1862–1933) The Dutch–American metalsmith is best known for copper lamps with mica shades. Working in the San Francisco Bay Area, he was a central figure of American Arts & Crafts.

C.F.A. VOYSEY (1857–1941) The English architect of country houses also designed furniture, wallpapers, fabrics and carpets, tile, and metalwork, with a vocabulary that drew from vernacular tradition; his oeuvre is craft-oriented and almost modern, in an evolution from the work of such Gothicist architects as J.P. Seddon.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT (1867–1959) The “greatest American architect” who gave us Usonian houses and New York’s Guggenheim Museum began his career in Oak Park, Illinois, as a leader of the Chicago Prairie School of architecture, coinciding with the early modernism of the American Arts & Crafts movement and sharing its tenets.