A Carefully Crafted Eden
July 2007
Step inside the living room of the chestnut-and-cedar shake log house that Gustav Stickley built in |
The living room of the log house: |
On the copper hood over one hearth Stickley had etched an engraving: “By hammer and hand do all things stand.” The adage captures an essential belief held by the patron saint of the American Arts and Crafts movement, a belief expressed in his ample homestead.
Conducting a tour of the property that Stickley called Craftsman Farms, executive director Arlette Klaric explains Stickley’s creation of a space at once abundant and intimate. “He has scripted a lifestyle of what you do in the living room,” she says. “What the Stickleys are promoting are stay-at-home activities.”
In its heyday, Craftsman Farms consisted of 10 buildings, including a horse stable, a cow barn and
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The dining room of the log house: Corner cabinets (background), c. 1910–11, oak with copper hardware; |
In Stickley’s mind, Arts and Crafts provided not merely a method for producing furniture or pottery or lighting or even entire homes. It was a means of self-transformation, a guide for living a proper life filled simultaneously with pursuits of the heart, the head and the hands. “He was creating a credible fiction that people bought into,” Klaric says. “Stickley created the myth, and his audience lived out the myth. Had it not been viable, he wouldn’t have been successful.”Today the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms is a National Historic Landmark and a Save America’s Treasures Site, open from April 1 to November 15. Thirty miles west of Manhattan in the township of Parsippany-Troy Hills, Stickley’s former home—which was converted into a museum when the property was threatened with development in 1989—draws nearly 20,000 visitors a year. The site is owned by the township, which leases the property to the Craftsman Farms Foundation. The foundation gives tours, organizes special events and operates a museum shop in the home’s former kitchen, selling books, tiles, pottery and myriad objects associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. For $99.99, you can buy a CD containing all 183 issues of The Craftsman—some 25,000 pages in all, including architectural designs for 200 Craftsman homes.
Over time, much of the Craftsman Farms property has been sold, leaving just 26 acres. Yet all of
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Log house at Craftsman Farms, c. 1913. |
The building recently benefited from a $750,000 restoration, part of more than $1 million in improvement projects overseen by the Craftsman Farms Foundation. This year the foundation plans to create a master site restoration plan and begin restoring other buildings on the property. And though much of the land that surrounds Craftsman Farms has succumbed to suburban sprawl—the house itself is just a short walk from busy, six-lane Route 10—Klaric says it’s not uncommon to sight deer, turkey and foxes on the grounds. Nearly a century removed from its construction, the home’s sylvan surroundings somehow remain endowed with the same bucolic spirit that so appealed to its original owner.
Stickley’s wide influence at the height of his popularity made his fall from grace even more dramatic. In March 1915, less than four years after moving his family into the log house at Craftsman Farms, Stickley filed for bankruptcy. He discontinued publication of The Craftsman the following year, and in 1917 he sold his home and surrounding acreage. He returned to Syracuse, New York, where he had begun his furniture-making business around the turn of the century. No longer active in the movement he helped define, Stickley remained in Syracuse until his death in 1942 at the age of 84. His decline brings to mind another fireplace engraving at Craftsman Farms: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”
Christopher Hann is a freelance writer specializing in the visual arts and culture. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Executive Traveler and New Jersey Monthly.SIMPLICITY STILL SELLS
David Rago fell hard for American Arts and Crafts more than 30 years ago. Today he publishes
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Morris chair, c. 1901–05, oak and leather |
That, of course, was the whole idea.
The Arts and Crafts movement began in England in the middle of the 19th century, fired by the writings of British reformers John Ruskin and William Morris, who railed against the technology of the Industrial Age and the opulence of Victorian style. A half-century later, the works of Ruskin and Morris informed that of Gustav Stickley, a 40-year-old American furniture maker who held a fundamental belief that manual labor should be part of a well-lived life.
Although the initial popularity of Arts and Crafts was short-lived in America, the movement enjoyed a strong revival in the last quarter of the 20th century. A 1902 Stickley sideboard that cost Barbra Streisand $362,000 in 1988 sold at Christie’s 11 years later for $596,500, a record for Arts and Crafts furniture. At the same auction, the Craftsman Farms Foundation spent $142,500 to retrieve a pair of oak cabinets, also owned by Streisand, that Stickley had made for his dining room at Craftsman Farms.
Today the Arts and Crafts designs of Stickley and his contemporaries—among them his four brothers—continue to inspire reverence among Arts and Crafts collectors. Rago’s auction house holds twice-yearly Arts and Crafts auctions at which top pieces still command top dollar. His auction in March grossed $4 million, highlighted by the sale of a handmade Frederick Hurten Rhead vase for $516,000, believed to be a record price for American art pottery. —C.H.