This week I’d like to talk about the amazing and lasting legacy from the Mission style and Craftsman style furniture design period. I’d also like to give some well earned, albeit posthumous credit to a couple of furniture designing pioneers from this period in American History. Now in the middle of designing and building a set of guest bedroom furniture in homage to that period, I thought I might talk about why those furniture styles are still relevant and popular today and close with a description of my current project.

Gustav Stickley and Charles Limbert were both born in the American Midwest in the 1850’s and were leading designers during the early 1900’s Arts and Crafts furniture movement. Both men were influenced by the simplicity of design from earlier Flemish and Dutch masters and applied what they called “honest and simple” designs to a wide variety of sturdy furniture. These pieces were beautiful in their simplicity, often with squared corners and vertical or parallel design elements; features you might recognize with Mission or Craftsman styles. The whole movement in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s was a significant departure from the more ornate designs found in Early American or French Provincial furniture. Mission and Craftsman furniture wouldn’t be caught dead with thin tapered spindle legs or hand carved flowers or filigree.

Craftsman Style furniture was “beefy” and utilitarian and could support the weight of a school bus if there was ever a bus repair scenario requiring it to be lifted up and supported by a Charles Limbert chair. Okay, not likely but I was looking for a descriptive scenario to illustrate my point.

Other designers also grabbed hold of this sturdy and simple design movement including Frank Lloyd Wright whose furniture pieces show this influence from the Arts and Crafts period. Wright is more commonly known for building architecture but he also created furniture to compliment his architectural designs.

I’ve done three other Craftsman furniture pieces in the last couple years, all of them built like a tank. One design was actually taken from Charles Limbert directly where plans were purchased to produce a rocker and ottoman set, perhaps the most comfortable piece of furniture I own. Best of all it will be a family heirloom and a legacy piece that should hopefully last for a hundred years or more. The other two designs are my own; a long sofa table with a waffle patterned lower shelf and our one piece, eight person dining table all done in White Oak. You’ll find those design and build videos on my YouTube channel.

It’s important to know that mine is not some old-guy rant about the “way things used to be”. Some of the most popular “fine” furniture available today is based on Mission style and Craftsman style furniture designs from more than 100 years ago. That design legacy lives on even if most people don’t even know the difference.

Most Fine Furniture Probably Isn’t

Now that I make my own stuff, I really like seeing web advertising for what is supposed to be better quality furniture. Local furniture retailers will also feature what looks like solid wood tables and chairs unless you happen to drop a corner accidentally. The back rooms of those places are filled with “scratch and dent” discount pieces showing the particle board underneath a thin veneer. Best of all I love seeing companies listing certain furniture sets as “Walnut”, when they really mean “Walnut finish” of a Southeast Asian Luaun tree variety. Oh, it’s real wood alright, just not Walnut and very often still a veneer over a pulp wood plank.

My youngest daughter, possibly not wanting to pester me with “just one more” furniture request, bought a dining table and chair set from some other online home goods retailer. It looks great and fits her dining nook perfectly. The legs are made from solid Luaun wood but the table top is finished in a way to hide the type of material used. The legs bolt to steel plates that attach to the table apron with small screws. It’s a perfectly acceptable way to manufacture an inexpensive table. And that’s my point.

IKEA? Ah-No-Ah. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Their stuff looks cool, if you like squares and rectangles and particle board and screws. In all honesty when we started out in our first apartment and first small home, this is the kind of stuff we could afford and it provided a place to store kids clothing or toys or books. It’s fine. Really. Just fine. Not a legacy piece. At the end of it’s short useful life, it will make for a great centerpiece at your Fourth of July bonfire.

The best quality pieces I’ve found come from small local Amish craftsman, and where you can tell immediately that the whole piece is made from solid hardwood with mortise and tenon or dowel joinery. There are other retailers both web based and local who feature Mission and Craftsman style pieces in solid hardwoods, but in a normal retail setting these pieces are immensely expensive. This is where you will find yourself flipping the chair over to see how it was designed and built. Plywood and screws in the subframe? Maybe take a pass.

The Headboard & Side Tables

Hard in a blog to convey a design element, but my Limbert rocker main leg supports were done with two thicker pieces of Oak set 90 degrees to each other and glued together on 45 degree miters. After glue up the main legs were further supported with splines on the mitered edges. That look and that design is simple, beefy and at the core of many Charles Limbert furniture pieces. Other areas of those furniture pieces use dowels to support those joints, and I’ll be incorporating dowels again on my table and headboard legs. I’ll add a picture of my sofa table at the bottom so you can see this basic leg design. (Rocker) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYsbNAnZo2E

I like using the “L” shaped legs of this Craftsman period for a couple reasons. First, the design allows you put two thinner pieces of wood together at the corner, where the outer look of the leg appears much wider and thicker. Second, the butt or mitered corner joint of the leg is easy to produce and you can make it as wide as you like. The finished leg is just as supportive of weight as if you had used one solid piece of wood at the same dimension. It’s really hard to find a four inch by four inch clear piece of white oak for a leg, but two pieces of ¾ inch thick oak that’s four inches wide join together for what looks like a four inch leg.

Maybe my favorite benefit of this design, is that the inner corner of the leg is ready to accept a shelf or a top apron support without you needing to figure out how to put a notch in a solid leg. I simply love the flexibility and sturdiness of this design for many types of furniture. It will work well for my two side tables and headboard project too.

That said, I think the glue is now dry on my table legs so it’s time to make the final trim cuts to length and joint the table tops. I was lucky enough to find a new local supplier for 5/4 oak stock, so we’re milling the rough lumber from scratch. After surface plane work on about 40 board feet, I filled a 40 gallon garbage can with those shavings… Now there’s a bonfire!

Best, Mark