Gustav Stickley and His Furniture
Stickley was born in 1857, the eldest of eleven children. When his father abandoned the family when he was in 8th grade, he had to leave school to help support his mother and siblings. By 1874, his family had moved to Pennsylvania, and Gustav was working at his uncle’s chair factory, where he was made manager and foreman by the age of 21. When he was not at the factory, young Stickley tried to continue his interrupted education in his uncle’s library, where he discovered the works William Morris and John Ruskin. Ruskin was a writer and social advocate, and Morris a designer whose philosophies urged a return to pride in workmanship and craft as an antidote to badly reproduced period furniture and the excesses and dehumanizing aspects of the industrial revolution.
The Gustav Stickley Furniture Company
After a series of unsuccessful partnerships with some of his brothers, and a trip to Europe, Stickley formed the Gustav Stickley Company, and designed a line of furniture based on his preference for simple lines and honest materials. This line he called “Structural”, and exhibited it at the Grand Rapids Furniture Market in 1900. Although it did not receive raves from retailers, House Beautiful Magazine praised the design as “sensible furniture.”
Gustav Stickley’s Furniture
Stickley’s designs feature clean, almost medieval lines and a lack of extraneous ornamentation, its only decorative elements being the beautifully crafted joinery that holds the pieces together. He named his structural furniture Craftsman style, and believed that it combined the best of man and machine.
Stickley Details
Gustav chose oak as the primary material for his Craftsman furniture. It was abundant in American forests, and thereby echoed the expression of the natural environment. The wood’s very visible grain was showcased by the forms of the furniture, so the grain complemented the lines of the piece rather than competing with it as was the case with more ornate styles.
Stickley finishes were impeccable, applied by hand, and restricted to only those shades that would enhance the oak’s natural color, grain and texture. His oak looked like oak, and was not dressed up to resemble any other exotic or costly specie of wood.
The clean lines of his chairs, tables, cabinets, desks, mirrors, screens, coat racks and benches were ornamented through the use of hand crafted joinery that both held the pieces together, and provided intricate detail. Mortise-and-tenon joints, where one element protrudes through a connecting element is one of the strongest joints in cabinetry, and produces and almost inlay effect as do exposed dowel joints. The butterfly joint resembles a bowtie, and is used to fasten two adjacent flat panels. Any or all of these joints will be found on both vintage and new pieces of Stickley furniture, which today, is also made of cherry.