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The Chair

Despite what must have been traumatic for 18-year-old Gustav when his father deserted his family, it rescued him from the drudgery (his opinion) of helping his father in his masonry trade. His mother moved the family close to her brother in Pennsylvania for support and introduced Gustav to his chair manufacturing business in which Gustav thrived.

For my dining room table, I wanted to replicate original Stickley dining chairs since chairs had really started him on his way toward his life-long passion for furniture design. I chose the H-Back Chair. It was probably introduced around 1910, very plain, not obviously structural, and, typical of this period, lighter in design for a middle-class buyer with a smaller house. (Stickley was known for paying attention to what the market wanted and making appropriate adjustments to his line.) Also, by this time, he was juggling the sales and marketing of a mind-boggling range of products by his own expansion: furniture, accessories, textiles, metal hollowware, lighting, etc. Though his Craftsman furniture remained superior in construction and finish to that of his many competitors, by 1910 he was spreading himself way too thin, adding few new furniture designs and heading into a decline from which he wouldn’t recover.

Stickley furniture was oak, fumed by exposing it to an ammonia solution in an airtight container resulting in four color finishes. All my furniture is cherry which I buy from Northeastern Scale Lumber Co., a great source of fine model building materials in Massachusetts. The H-Back chair is free of the structural elements like exposed tenons so common in many of Stickley’s earlier chairs. I used dowels to support the construction of mine. I also wanted to cover the seats with real black leather which I found online at Artisan Leather in the UK. Their gorgeous black lambskin is 0.6mm thick, soft as butter and easy to wrap around wood seat forms and tuck into the chair frames.

Review: I think my H-Back chairs are probably too “beefy” in proportions compared to their lighter originals…and, no (I’m sure you wondered), my chair seats of leather stretched over wooden forms must not be very soft and comfy. These are the first chairs I have ever made. Thinking of all the additional chairs of all kinds I’m going to have to make, I’m always open to room for improvement!

February 1, 2020/by Nancy Sipple

Gustav, His Early Life

All Posts, Mini Craftsman

Gustav Stickley (who was Gustave until he dropped the “e” in 1903) was actually born Gustavus Stoeckel to Wisconsin German immigrant parents, the oldest boy of many children, in 1858. He worked alongside his father, a farmer and stone mason, quit school at 12 to help family finances, quickly learned he disliked his father’s heavy masonry work, (“…hard daily labor with a stubborn material…” he remembered), and moved with his family to Pennsylvania to be closer to his mother’s family after his father deserted them when Gustav was 17. His uncle owned a chair factory. Gustav proved to be gifted chair builder appreciating the “responsive, sympathetic qualities of wood” and later a good business manager too. Promoted to foreman, he had comfortable life, educated himself, got married, started a family but began to feel irresistibly strong personal ambitions that would guide the course of the rest of his life.

In 1883, Gustav and two brothers went into the chair business together, Stickley Brothers and Company, selling, both retail and wholesale, their own furniture and that of others. Later, as that relentless personal ambition took hold, he left his brothers and formed a new partnership with furniture salesman, Elgin Simonds, in 1888 to form Stickley and Simonds Company. However, Gustav would soon become unhappy with the elaborate and ornate designs they were still producing that remained popular. Those tastes of the Victorian period had lingered way beyond Gustav’s patience for something unique and new.

In England, 1888 was also the year that the Arts and Crafts movement was born. Gustav had made several trips to England and was attracted to its philosophies, design simplification, and emphasis on hand craftsmanship and honest work. Back home, differences arose. Stickley bought Simonds out in 1898, and Stickley’s personal ambition was unleashed!!!

Stickley’s “New Furniture” was introduced at a trade show in 1900 and distributed through Tobey Furniture Company of Chicago. Before long, frustrated that his name didn’t get the top billing he craved, he set out on his own in 1901 with his own furniture company, United Crafts, and published “The Craftsman” magazine for the first time.

October 24, 2019/by Nancy Sipple

Stacey’s Miniature Masonry

All Posts, Mini Craftsman

Little bricks from Stacey’s Miniature Masonry come with all kinds of instructions, pattern suggestions and paper guides for spacing. They can also be full, dimensional bricks for stand-alone models like a fireplace or stand-alone wall, or what they call brickslips, thin slips of brick that give a real brick finish when glued in place on a wall and grouted. Just as life sized bricks aren’t exactly uniform in size, neither are these tiny ones. Therefore, there’s some eyeballing involved and adjustments to be made. Keeping the rows level is the easy part and can be accomplished with lines drawn on the wall. Vertical guide lines can be drawn on the wall too, but it’s the vertical consistency that can require sanding off a fraction of a brick now and then or making the spacing between two bricks slightly wider or narrower than usual. Once grouted, these irregularities seem to blend in.

Color is also a factor. I chose Stacey’s Multi Red Bricks that vary in color from several shades of red to a few that are dark reddish-brown. I looked at the whole wall as I went and tried to keep the color arrangement very random. The bricks also vary in thickness and finish. Some are paper smooth; others are rough. The finished effect becomes just what Stickley prescribed: a surface naturally irregular enough to cause a variation of light and shade over the wall. Absolutely no monotony allowed!

September 27, 2019/by Nancy Sipple

Bricks and More Bricks

All Posts, Mini Craftsman

As I’ve said, I fell in love with the façade of the No. 99 “city house”, its third floor dormer, second floor “sleeping porch” (balcony off the master bedroom to you and me) screened by flower boxes for “privacy from the city street below”, main floor leaded windows, hooded entry door, big front porch with more flower boxes, and brick. Lots of it! Rough textured brick was the choice of Stickley for this city house with its fireproof-ness but also for its decorative quality. Brick’s color is natural and the surface is irregular enough to create a variation of light and shade over the wall. He wanted to avoid “any effect of monotonous regularity”. Stickley designed decorative recessed areas and even specified contrasting mortar and wide joints with that in mind.

Facade – bricking complete, beginning of slate roof in progress.

My task: where to find bricks. Miniature bricks. Real bricks. (I’m determined to keep my project a plastic-free environment.) I finally found them online at Stacey’s Miniature Masonry (www.miniaturebricks.com) in England. It’s a miniature builders’ yard supplying hand-cut shaped stone, marble, brick, slate along with grit, pebbles, modeling dust and lead flashing specifically in the 1:12 scale (with other scales available on request). All products (including adhesives, grout, and tools) are securely packed and shipped promptly. Stacey’s site is full of advice on how to use their materials and a gallery of incredible project photos for inspiration (or intimidation!).

September 27, 2019/by Nancy Sipple

Building the Shell

All Posts, Mini Craftsman

I’m not sure where I got the idea to use Baltic birch plywood for the basic structure of my house, but it is a remarkable product and great choice. It comes from a region of Europe around the Baltic Sea and is manufactured for European cabinet making. Many standard lumber yards carry it, or it can be ordered from most home centers, wood worker sources or miniature and model maker suppliers. Standard sheets are 5’ X 5’. We used ½” for the exterior walls and 3/8” for the interior and dadoed the panels in place with a combination of Titebond III wood glue and a pin nailer.

Besides being beautiful, Baltic birch plywood’s claim to fame for me is its strength and stability. The way it’s manufactured makes the sheets balanced and reduces warp or bowing. One eighth inch product has 3 plies. Half inch has nine! I guess I’m hoping my finished house will last for the ages.

September 13, 2019/by Nancy Sipple

Our First House

All Posts, Mini Craftsman

Our first Craftsman — Our first Vashon Island house, built in 1909, possibly from a Sears catalog house kit.

When my husband, Gary, and I came to Vashon Island in 1988, we were looking for an older house on some acreage. We had done a lot of looking in the greater Seattle area with no luck. What we found that day on Vashon was a remarkably preserved 1909 Craftsman on 14 acres which we knew we wanted just driving up the driveway for the first time. I had long loved the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods but knew little about the Arts & Crafts era in between them at the beginning of the 20^th century. Both of us were new to the Craftsman movement’s place in history, its architecture, furniture, design, and philosophies of its founders.

To say we “owned” that precious house is not the right word; we were its newest “stewards” and we assumed that role seriously. The house needed almost nothing from us except care and love. The oak inlaid floors on the main level were flawless. All the main floor windows were leaded beveled glass. Original ornate lincrusta lined the dining room walls under the plate rail. A large stained-glass window on the main stairway landing had two side panels that still opened. Most amazing were the light sockets at the intersections of the coffered ceilings still equipped with little round 7-watt 1909 bulbs that cast a warm candle-light glow in the rooms. We were missing only two!

That house of ours gave birth to my passion to learn about all things Craftsman: houses, decoration, furniture, accessories, linens, clothing, motifs, colors theory, life style, philosophies and history of the movement. One minute into that research and you’ll learn that Gustav Stickley (1858-1942) was the main proponent of the early 20^th century American Craftsman style that followed closely after the British Arts and Crafts movement of the late 1800’s.

The idea of building and furnishing a miniature 1/12 scale house has been in the back of my mind for decades. Most unfinished house shells or kits on the market are Victorian, cheesy, and/or expensive or not what I imagined. The weekend after the inauguration in 2017, seriously depressed and barely functioning, I decided the time had finally come to distract myself with a big project: build that house of my dreams. I had owned for years (and poured over countless times) the two catalogs of home plans that were featured in Stickley’s “The Craftsman” magazine, published between 1901 and 1916. Starting in 1904, members of a “Craftsman Homebuilders’ Club” could order plans for homes featured in the magazine. I took the weekend to decide on City House #99 (October, 1910 edition), one of only two “city” house plans Stickley offered, and a real departure from his usual bungalow concept. It was designed for a long, narrow, mid-block city lot, 25’ wide, and with that dimension, I could do scale drawings of the three levels of floorplans and the few elevations pictured in the article, all lacking most measurements. So, it began.

September 9, 2019/by Nancy Sipple

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