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Alise O'Brien
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Intuition, knowledge and old-fashioned sleuthing can be as important as cold cash when building a collection.
Just ask this St. Louis couple, owners of more than 50 pieces of original Stickley and other Arts and Crafts furnishings, a style that reached its apex between 1890 and 1920 and was embraced everywhere from New York to California.
The collection may have started serendipitously, but it took interior designer Jimmy Jamieson and the homeowners nine months of reading, looking, telephoning and traveling to pull it together. Along the way, it became an ongoing passion for the three of them.
The love affair began when the couple hired builder Dan Glidewell to remodel their 28-year-old California contemporary-style home in the Village of Westwood. What started as a hearth room off the kitchen expanded into a renovation of the sprawling two-story house. Glidewell transformed the former brick exterior to cut limestone and revived the interior with more limestone and granite, rough-hewn beams and stuccoed walls.
Then came the quandary: how to fill the new empty rooms? The couple was stymied. Enter Jamieson, who, as his assistant Adriane Van Bokkelen recalls, stood with his arms crossed as he perused the rooms during his first visit.
Through the remodel, the house had morphed into an Arts and Crafts/Prairie-inspired home because of its mix of natural materials, fine detailing and simple, clean lines. The solution? Period furnishings.
“I knew that Arts and Crafts furniture would enhance the home’s design,” Jamieson says. “My job would be to build a collection that would complement the inherent characteristics of the architecture.”
Jamieson served not only as the designer but as historian and tour coach.
First, he taught the couple about Gustav Stickley—who, in 1901, introduced his furniture line, known as Craftsman, which is recognized as the first truly American furniture and took its name from Stickley’s furniture catalog, The Craftsman. Jamieson then trained them how to spot variations in style, because Stickley’s four brothers also produced furniture through three separate companies. He educated them about other key players of the time, lending them books to devour—which they did—on designers such as Charles and Henry Greene, Louis Sullivan and Louis Comfort Tiffany, then took them through Arts and Crafts homes in University Heights and bungalows on the South Side.
The couple began buying Arts and Crafts pieces at Meramec Antiques, a store on Antique Row in South St. Louis. Jamieson worked the phone, calling dealers in other cities, and ultimately traveling to London, New York and San Francisco to ferret out more finds.
Both husband and wife were pleased with his selections.
“They really reflect who I am—simple and down-to-earth,” the wife says. “They’re also well made, quiet and reminiscent of the back-to-basics approach I love.”
When possible, the focus was on authentic pieces by the movement’s premier designers. Arts and Crafts furniture is built mostly from oak, with exposed joinery, hammered hardware, incorporated tacks and hand-rubbed clear finishes. Almost all upholstered pieces have new leather, since period leather, if still intact, is usually cracked and hard. When authentic wasn’t available, pieces with less tony provenances were selected. One reproduction was slipped in to house a modern amenity—a TV.
The result is a collection of rooms that don’t resemble museum vignettes. The goal was to achieve clean, livable spaces where the family could cook, entertain, work, nap and sculpt.
In their quest to balance their new fine furnishings with an active family life, the couple added their own touches. They enlivened the taupe-colored rooms—a palette reflective of the period’s appreciation for nature—with colorful kilim rugs and pillows. They also incorporated a few fun, inexpensive pieces, such as a $19 chandelier from Home Depot, which illuminates a trestle-style dining table and signed Gustav Stickley chairs.
In the massive, beamed great room, a newly upholstered sofa plumped with pillows is grouped with a hexagonal game table with a wagon-wheel base that has the L. & J.G. Stickley signature (the company owned by brothers Leopold and John George). At one end of the room is a triple-door bookcase by the Stickley brothers, with original hardware and a handcrafted emblem. Two Mexican antler-style chandeliers that Jamieson found in California give the husband a touch of the Aspen-lodge ambience he wanted.
In the hearth room’s stone fireplace, Bradley & Hubbard Arts and Crafts andirons gild the lily. In a corner of the kitchen stands one of the most important additions—a tall chest, one of only 200 made, stamped with Gustav Stickley’s name inside a drawer.
Though no longer actively on the hunt for new pieces, the couple and Jamieson remain alert in case something wonderful turns up. Arts and Crafts furniture is more difficult to find (and more expensive to buy) because interest in the style has escalated. A Gustav Stickley sideboard can bring $600,000, says Maggie Morettini, affiliated with Michael FitzSimmons Decorative Arts in Chicago, one of the country’s best dealers. “We wait for these pieces to turn up out of estate sales,” says Ran Harris, owner of Meramec Antiques.
Jamieson and his clients have mastered important lessons beyond recognizing mortise-and-tenon joints and knowing that the different Stickley brothers operated different businesses. z
“One of the most rewarding parts of what I do is helping to assemble a magnificent collection, whether it’s period furniture, antiquities or contemporary art. It supersedes any decorating advice I can offer,” Jamieson says.
And the couple has gained knowledge and passion for a design era they only recently discovered—a period they now greatly admire for its subtlety. “It isn’t flashy,” says the wife. “Nothing about it slaps you in the face. It has integrity. Who can ask for more?”
Barbara Ballinger and Margaret Crane
