Category: Welsh Stick Chairs by John Brown

When I first picked up “Welsh Stick Chairs,” I didn’t fall in love with the chair that John Brown built for the book. That chair had a steam-bent armbow that didn’t quite suit my eye. Instead, I fell for the drawings of the antique chairs that John Brown showed in the book, most of them from St Fagans National Museum of History.

John Brown’s later chairs, which were featured in Good Woodworking magazine, also enraged my chair lust and drove me to Cobden, Ontario, to take my first chair class in 2003.

So when I visited St Fagans last week, I was quite excited to see the chair that was featured on the original cover of “Welsh Stick Chairs” and survived as the frontispiece of later (but lesser) editions of the book.

This chair is a stunner for several reasons. Take a look at the armbow. It’s made from two pieces of wood that are joined with a giant half-lap that terminates at miters at both ends. Call the chair primitive if you like, but that is a nice piece of work. The other interesting part of the armbow is there is no “doubler” that thickens the armbow where the spindles pass through. The lack of the doubler gives the chair a lighter appearance and makes it simpler to build.

The wide seat is radically reduced in thickness at the edges, adding to the sense of lightness. The legs, which are round as near as I can tell, are thinner than is typical. And locating them closer to the center of the seat gives the chair an hourglass look. With these legs, it would be easy to make this chair look top-heavy, but the builder got the splay correct so the chair looks solid to sit on.

The seat shape and armbow are tidy. I think the person who made this particular chair had a good eye for proportion, curve and line. Interestingly, the chair had stretchers near the floor, which are now missing. If I made a reproduction, I don’t know if I would restore the stretchers.

Finally, there is the crest rail (or comb). It has just a little curve to it and is gently pillowed on the front.

It really is a flawless chair and deserved its place on the cover. I’m quite happy that our edition of “Welsh Stick Chairs” put this example in its rightful place.

— Christopher Schwarz

When deciding what chairs to place in the historic buildings collected at the St Fagans National Museum of Wales, Emyr Davies says museum officials have to be careful.

If they place a high-style chair in a house or a room at the castle, no one will bother it, says Emyr, the senior conservator for furniture. But if they put one of the vernacular Welsh stick chairs on display, visitors are so drawn to them and curious that they will plop right down in them.

During my visit to St Fagans I felt that same urge to sit in every chair, but I resisted (perhaps because I was accompanied by museum officials). So instead I took 200 photographs of the 29 chairs that we inspected during the day. Some of the chairs were as familiar as old friends because I had studied them ad nauseam in John Brown’s “Welsh Stick Chairs.”

But about half of the chairs were new to me – chairs that had been in the storerooms of St Fagans or in their shop for repair. These chairs were a revelation and offered details I had not encountered before in books. One was green with yellow pinstripes. Another had a crest rail that resembled a cartoon dog bone. I believe I counted three seat shapes that were new to me. Plus, one that was painted with oxblood.

I also had the great privilege to listen to Emyr’s thoughts on the chairs after spending his career studying and repairing them. Here’s one detail to consider.

Emyr puts the chairs into two broad categories. The first category consists of chairs that have – for lack of a better word – Windsor-like qualities. Sticks that pass through an armbow and enter a crest rail (or comb) at the top of the chair. The second category of chairs are technically low-back chairs. The arm is usually quite massive and is obviously made from a branch that has either been trained into this shape while the tree was alive or was found in the wild.

Emyr has several names for these chairs that reflect the shape of the arm, including “hornback” and “rootback” chairs. They also are sometimes called Cardiganshire chairs because that area of Wales tends to produce lots of curved timber.

I’ve never built a chair from this second category because the arm always vexed me. The solution to that is, as Emyr put it: Get a dog and go for walks in the woods. You’ll see the arms in the branches.

So just as I was placing a few of those chairs on my to-build list, we walked into one of the buildings open to the public, and I was struck dumb by a chair that is named in my notes as Chair 024. I took 19 photos of this chair. That’s a love affair in my world, and I’ll write about this beauty in my next entry.

— Christopher Schwarz

I’ve known Chris Williams for a few years, and I now feel we are destined to have our lives intertwined for the rest of my days. There simply isn’t anyone else who thinks about chairs in the the way I do. And when I say chairs, I mean Welsh chairs.

I don’t know if I have any real Welsh in my blood. My latest Ancestry.com profile says 22 percent of my DNA is from England, Wales and nearby. While that’s something, I do know that Welsh chairs are etched in my brain.

When I pulled up to Chris’s tidy home in Llanybri late Tuesday I night, I hugged him, and we talked about chairs until midnight. When I left Saturday morning, our last words (before a warning about a tricky turn on my trip) were about chairs.

And the rest of the time in the middle was all about chairs as well.

During my visit, Chris was building a chair in his garage, sneaking off at odd hours to fashion its sticks. Plus, he had two recently completed chairs in the guest room. One was a new design he has been working on (follow him on Instagram if you want see its development) and the other was for his book “The Life & Work of John Brown.”

All three are markedly different. So we spent hours (apologies to Chris’s wife, Claire) talking about the details down to the facets, grain lines and fibers.

While we were muddling minutiae, Chris would stop and exclaim: “You couldn’t say something like that in front of John Brown. He’d tell you to (expletive deleted). He was all about the form.”

Like naughty schoolboys, we did it anyway. Apologies to the memory of John Brown.

— Christopher Schwarz