Category: The Anarchist’s Design Book

The act of naming something is, in my view, a kind of violence. But it also is a helpful form of shorthand.

With furniture, the most common way to name it is by its ornament (Chippendale, Arts & Crafts, Ikea). This name gives us a rough idea of what it looks like, perhaps when it was built and maybe even some of its construction details (mahogany, through-tenons, confirmat screws).

But what if the piece of furniture doesn’t really have much ornament? What if we are unsure as to when it was built? What if the piece appears in the furniture record made out of every conceivable hardwood and softwood?

What do we call this furniture? One term is “vernacular,” though that word casts a net that’s too wide. Vernacular encompasses 15th-century trestle tables with wedged through-tenons and pine shelves assembled with drywall screws in a mall kiosk.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about furniture on an X/Y axis. The X axis is ornament, from no ornament to all ornament (think Grinling Gibbons). The Y axis is construction quality, from bombproof to being a bomb ready to explode when the humidity changes.

This X/Y axis creates four spaces and four kinds of furniture, and it gives us a sliding scale that we can use to discuss how furniture is made. Let’s talk about these four types.

1. Furniture of the rich who have taste – high-style ornamentation and outstanding joinery. This is almost always the furniture of the well-to-do. This category encompasses furniture from every era, from the Middle Ages up to five minutes ago. It’s period highboys from Thomas Chippendale. Prairie settees from Frank Lloyd Wright. Rockers from Sam Maloof. This is furniture that is built by commission – not manufactured. It is made by the best artisans by the people who can afford it. Its ornamentation might not be ostentatious, but it is still incredibly evident, distinctive and expensive to produce (think James Krenov). The furniture is also – for lack of a better word – specific and not vague. It represents the focused efforts of the builder and the customer to produce something unique.

2. Furniture of the poseurs – high-style ornamentation and crap craftsmanship. This is the world of Ethan Allen, Williams-Sonoma, Baker (and many other commercial manufacturers) who seek to provide furniture that looks like it belongs to the very rich at a price that the upper-middle class can afford. In general, this is the furniture that looks good (even great) from a distance but fails when examined closely. Wood selection is terrible. The finish is more obscuring than revealing of the grain. The interior components of the furniture are generic and have more in common with mass-manufactured furniture. Dovetails are made by machine. Mortise-and-tenon joinery is via cope-and-stick (at best). But most of all, it is manufactured – the parts are interchangeable with other pieces from the same run. And the detailing is, in general, somewhat generic. It is designed to appeal to thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of customers – not just one customer. So these pieces are never polarizing and almost always like melba toast: pleasant but not memorable.

3. Furniture of the desperate – furniture built only on price. With these pieces, style and craftsmanship are subsumed by the bottom line. This is the particleboard furniture covered in plastic veneer that looks like oak (if you have been drinking). It is designed only to hit a price point and provide a temporary function. It is constructed in a way that it will survive only about five years or one significant family move before becoming too wobbly to keep. It is designed by the opportunistic to fill the temporary needs of the desperate.

4. Furniture of necessity – high craftsmanship and low (to non-existent) ornament. This is the furniture of people who require, demand or desire durability and have no need for ornament or high-style detail. The most important aspect of this class of furniture is that it be useful, durable and able to remain attractive (or non-offensive) over a long period of time. Examples of this furniture: Institutional or work furniture, military furniture, servant-quarters furniture, school furniture, traveling furniture, library furniture, and (most of all) furniture made for and by craftsmen for their own use. While ornament is not entire eschewed, it is always secondary to the function and durability of the finished object.

So I know that the above classification is flawed. It doesn’t account for some outliers – low craftsmen who build bonnet-top highboys for their homes. The extremely rich who are content to furnish their homes from WalMart. The occasional piece of manufactured furniture that is transcendental – Eames chairs, Stella cafe chairs and so forth.

But it is better than calling anything that lacks carving as: Shaker.

— Christopher Schwarz

Our Sunday-afternoon tour of the Aiken-Rhett house in Charleston, S.C., began in the basement of the historic structure. And as far as I was concerned, it could have ended there.

The first room on the tour is the so-called “warming room,” where slaves would hold the food that was about to be served to the masters upstairs – up the back stairwell of course.

This room contained a stretcher table that looked just like many of the stretcher tables I’ve been investigating at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. A ladderback chair in front of the hearth looks like the chairs in my files. The built-in cupboards were detailed with simple beads for the most part – plus some other straightforward profiles.

The reason this room was so intoxicating is the Aiken-Rhett house is my favorite kind of house museum. Instead of trying to restore the structure to some certain point in its history, the Historic Charleston Foundation committed itself to preserving the house in its current state. Not adding. Not taking away. Not changing. Just suspending the house in time after an amazing 192-year run in a city at the epicenter of our country’s volatile history.

So the furniture is the real stuff. Not reimagined or restored or rebuilt to some modern plan. The walls throughout the house are in various stages of decay, with the shadow of every layer of wallpaper and built-in still evident.

The warming room, slave quarters and work yard are interesting and striking to me because they have aged far better than the rooms reserved for the masters. The slave quarters feature simple plaster walls. The moulding at the floor is simple yellow pine with a bead at the top. The original furniture is nothing special, and yet it wears its scars from age better than the high-style stuff in the main house.

In the fancy part of the house the elaborate mouldings, plaster work, wallpaper and paint haven’t survived as well – no surprise considering the fragility of the materials. The original furniture was fairly well cared for, though the post-1830 stuff is awkward, heavily veneered and infused with classicism (to my eye). Interestingly, the slave’s work yard was built with Gothic details.

So what the heck does all this mean? Glad you asked. The Aiken-Rhett house is definitely a four-story touchstone for my next book, “The Furniture of Necessity.” Until I walked into the cool, dark confines of the house’s warming room, I was wondering if my ideas for the book were nuts. After 10 minutes poking around the warming room, I became certain my ideas for the book were nuts – and dead-nuts correct.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. My apologies for the photos. The museum’s policy is to allow photos only from exterior vantage points. If you are ever in Charleston, I highly recommend a visit to this home.

“It is worth noting on the Platte one may sometimes see the shattered wrecks of ancient claw-footed tables, well waxed and rubbed, or massive bureaus of carved oak. These, some of them no doubt the relics of ancestral prosperity in the colonial time, must have encountered strange vicissitudes. Brought, perhaps from England; then, with the declining fortunes of their owners, borne across the Alleghanies to the wilderness of Ohio or Kentucky; then to Illinois or Missouri; and now at last fondly stowed away in the family wagon for the interminable journey to Oregon. But the stern privations of the way are little anticipated. The cherished relic is soon flung out to scorch and crack upon the hot prairie.”

— Francis Parkman, “The Oregon Trail, Works, Vol. 12,” (Little, Brown, 1910) page 103

I spent today at the research center of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) on a scouting trip for my upcoming book “The Furniture of Necessity.” MESDA’s research center in Winston Salem, N.C., is an irresistible magnet for this book because of the museum’s “object database.”

This database has 20,000 objects of furniture, metalwork, textiles etc. in it. And you can browse through it to your heart’s content – the research center is free and open to the public (true Southern hospitality).

I pored over the furniture archives today until the research center closed, and I scanned more than 150 photos and datasheets about pieces of furniture that were produced for the middle-class (whatever that is) – or people with austere tastes.

I got some amazing stuff, including some Moravian chairs that are shockingly contemporary. Plus some great stretcher tables, six-board chests, drop-leaf tables and chests of drawers. I’m afraid I can’t show you my scans because they are protected by copyright, but I will attempt to divert your scorn by writing about something else – Jerome Bias!

I got to have lunch with Jerome, a furniture maker and interpreter at Old Salem. Jerome wrote the great story in Popular Woodworking Magazine about Thomas Day and was the guy who introduced me to the research center at MESDA.

When I visited Jerome’s shop at Old Salem he was cleaning out the bottom of an oilstone box he was building using an old woman’s tooth router plane. We had lunch at the local shop of Martin O’Brien, a cabinetmaker, finisher and stone carver.

The barbeque was terrific, of course, but the conversation was even better. Martin does a lot of work on MESDA pieces and had some great insights into traditional finishing that made me stop chewing my food.

So that’s what I did on my summer vacation. And now I have earned a can of Fat Tire.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I did change the title of this blog. Some readers pointed out that using “chicken” in the headline could be misconstrued. Not my intent. Ever. So I just changed it. This is not worth of comment please.