Why Arts & Crafts, why now
A century-old movement, a problem that hasn't gone away, and why we're picking it up again.
Most furniture today is disposable. Flat-packed, particleboard, a printed laminate that looks like walnut, a chair that comes in a box with an Allen key. It lasts five years if you’re lucky.
Arts & Crafts was a reply to a version of this problem in the 1870s. British factories were turning out decorated junk, and two people in particular pushed back. John Ruskin, a critic, argued in a chapter called “The Nature of Gothic” that factory work was dehumanizing because it took the thinking out of making: the worker no longer designed what he was building. William Morris took Ruskin’s argument and moved it into the workshop. He founded Morris & Co. in 1861, made furniture and wallpaper and tapestries to his own principles, and summed the whole movement up in one sentence: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
The idea traveled. Gustav Stickley brought it to upstate New York and built a whole furniture line on it, calling the style Craftsman. Greene and Greene built houses in Pasadena that showed every joint. The Roycroft shop in East Aurora turned out books and metalwork on the same principles. By the 1920s the movement had faded. Modernism picked up its cleaner lines. The mass market picked up its ornaments, watered down.
The problem it was built to answer has only gotten worse. The factory is global now. It ships to your door, gives you instructions, and sells you a replacement in five years. Small shops that could make furniture another way are fewer. The trades that teach joinery and finish and material selection are fewer. A lot of modern furniture is, as a matter of manufacturing policy, not repairable: when the cam-lock fails, there’s nothing underneath it but a hole in pressed board.
The old answer still works, for reasons that aren’t complicated. A joint you can see is a joint you can fix. Solid wood scratches and gets refinished; particleboard swells and never gets better. A piece with a maker’s name on it has a person behind it who can answer for the work. Furniture built this way is heavier, more expensive, and slower to make. It’s also the only kind that lasts.
Morris wasn’t arguing for a return to the Middle Ages. He was arguing for a different relationship between a person and what they made. The design language of Arts & Crafts was clean, austere, and structural. It was radical in its own century. A hundred and fifty years later, it’s still more honest than most of what gets called modern.
Call it a New Arts & Crafts. Same principles, new century, and almost nobody else working this way.