The Shakers and the Craftsman Style

Shaker cabinetry and the Craftsman style are popular buzzwords these days, but there is a lot of confusion about what Shaker and Craftsman style really mean.  

The Shakers were a large and successful 19th Century religious and communal sect.  Their accomplishments were many, but perhaps most famous today is their simple, well joined, lightweight, and relatively unadorned furniture.  They also were well known for emphasizing clever, functional storage.   They built a lot of drawers! 

The Craftsman style – which was particularly popular from about 1890 to 1930, grew out of the Arts and Crafts movement in England, led by William Morris.  Morris sought to revive weaving, printing, and other decorative arts, and particularly furniture making.  In protest against the growing factory system, the emphasis was on hand-craft.  Morris redeveloped and taught these crafts to preserve and re-create them. 

In the US, this became the Craftsman Style.  The Bungalows of California, the early houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, the iconic houses of Greene and Greene, and the furniture of Stickley are well known examples of the U.S. movement.  The Shakers and the architecture and crafts of Japan were also important influences on Craftsman.

Craftsman style furniture is usually beefier than the Shaker predecessor, but it’s akin to it in many ways.  Both are simple, strong, graceful and relatively free of decoration, particularly compared to the Victorian furniture it stood opposite to.  Both used natural materials, and strong, often exposed, joinery.    Both traditions  emphasized using natural materials, and also a certain transparency of intention: form follows function.

Often people call and ask, do we do Shaker?  Are you Craftsman Style?  I am flummoxed.   So many products, particularly in cabinetry, tout these names, particularly the Shaker tagline, but have nothing at all to do with the spirit or the detailing of the originals.  Or else they have become so expensive that William Morris and the Shaker carpenters who started this would blanch. 

We admire these traditions immensely; we’ve spent a lot of time studying this work and visiting its shrines.  We make no attempt to ape either style, but we feel very much a part of the tradition.  The underlying ideas - simplicity, directness of design, and attentive use of natural materials – still hold good, and inform what we do, and we borrow details from both movements when they suit the projects we do, and the people we do them for.

Click to Slideshow#3: Craftsman/Shaker

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