A Diverse Lineage

Wonder what “Arts & Crafts” really means? It’s hard to see the connection between a shingled bungalow and Glasgow architect Mackintosh’s severe, white stuccoed houses, or between, say, William Morris’s wallpapers swirling with stylized flowers and a squat lamp base of hammered copper. The Arts & Crafts Movement and its ongoing Revival have enormous breadth. That’s because Arts & Crafts is not one “style,” but rather an approach to design and living. As was true 100 years ago, it has many languages. 

British work (by Morris, Godwin, Voysey, and Mackintosh) is often more delicate, and later work leans toward Art Nouveau and even modernism. American Craftsman pieces by Stickley and the Roycrofters are sturdy and rectilinear; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School designs are proto-modern; Greene and Greene California houses show the influence of European chalet architecture and Japanese woodwork and joinery. In both original and new work, German, Austrian, Russian, or Swedish influence may be present.

Even if we confine ourselves to the American Arts & Crafts (or Craftsman) Movement, we find many variants. English derived houses are in evidence on this side of the Atlantic—houses that are not shingled bungalows, but may be steep-roofed and multi-gabled, often stuccoed—or the “Tudorbethan” type built from the 1890s through about 1918. Gustav Stickley, now associated with the bungalow era, published plans for houses ranging from Dutch Colonial to Tudor, all sharing a naturalism and expressing a vernacular tradition. Arts & Crafts philosophy and practice affected the design of bungalows, Mission and Spanish Colonial Revivals, Elizabethan and Tudor houses, Prairie School designs, and the American Foursquare, all of those more-or-less contemporaneous.

Arts & Crafts furniture has as many vocabularies as the architecture. Designers in London and Vienna, Glasgow and Syracuse, Chicago and Pasadena created furniture that was extremely diverse. In today’s revival, artisans are creating not only reproductions and adaptations but also wholly contemporary pieces, often deemed Arts & Crafts only because they are designed, built, and finished by one maker.

Still, the furniture can’t be defined even by its being handmade. Craft traditions were upheld and the guild method revived, but then again, Gustav Stickley’s mortise-and-tenon joints were made by machine in his factory. Exposed joinery (by hand or machine) is a leitmotif of American Arts & Crafts furniture. Yet British and Austrian furniture most often had hidden joinery, in keeping with the long tradition of fine furniture-making. The use of domestic woods, especially such “humble” species as oak, is a common thread. Plain furniture is typical, but both England’s Ernest Gimson and Stickley’s designer Harvey Ellis used inlaid marquetry. Art Nouveau, the design movement that began in France and Belgium, is known for sinuous lines and ornamentation. Most period Arts & Crafts furniture was clear-finished, stained, or fumed to darken it. Then again, Mackintosh used opaque black and white paints. An important influence, held over from the Aesthetic Movement (the direct precursor to English Arts & Crafts), which had so embraced Japonisme, is Asian design.

The good news for Arts & Crafts-era homes is that they are very forgiving of eclectic interiors. From the beginning, the house probably had a mix of Craftsman and Colonial Revival motifs in its woodwork, certainly in the furniture. Colonial-era classics (like benches and Windsor chairs), rustic furnishings, wicker, iron, and more typical Arts & Crafts styles work together. Stickley-type furniture marries well with Modern furniture. The revival that got its start ca. 1972 shows no sign of abating. Offerings range from exact reproductions to interpretive new work that may only allude to the past.