Stickley Furniture
Each issue was intended to promote his line of furniture but more importantly to encourage the buying public to think of their houses as homesteads with healthful open floor plans, light-filled rooms with little furniture or extraneous ornamentation, blending into and building upon the local landscape. The fireplace, or "hearth", was the focal point of this family environment. The "vernacular" of the Arts & Crafts movement spread across the United States' landscape rapidly between 1900 and 1915. Its most prominently successful communities were on the West Coast, particularly in Southern California. However, nearly every American town and city still has its neighborhoods of Arts & Crafts-style homes built up until 1920.
The wealthy could, of course, build their homes with the assistance of such architects as Wright and the Greene brothers, and the poor could order their houseplans from the Sears Catalogue. The middle class bought house plans from The Craftsman, which published monthly designs by Stickley himself, and later by his stable of draftsmen.
Every illustration of a Stickley house contained Stickley furniture, naturally. However, Gustav eschewed mechanization of his furniture production, and was not a particularly astute businessman. In 1902, John George had left Stickley Brothers Furniture Company to open the Onondaga Shops with Leopold in Fayetteville, New York, incorporating four years later as L. & J.G. Stickley, Inc. They made furniture that resembled Gustav's. Gustav was, in effect, in competition with his brothers. Within a few years, as his company faced bankruptcy, his brothers Leopold and John George acquired (either voluntarily or after the bankruptcy, by purchase) the entire business and began reproducing the G. Stickley designs. They had learned that some machine production could reduce expenses without sacrificing design, by continuing to use mortise-and-tenon joinery, hammered-metal hinges and handles, quartersawn oak, and the cost-efficient purchase of pre-treated leathers for upholstery.
At some point, the Stickleys had exhibited their innovative furniture designs to the Grand Rapids, Michigan furniture manufacturing community (probably at the Chicago Exposition or a Grand Rapids trade fair in 1905), and within a very short time the designs had been copied, adapted, or reinvented by most of the furniture makers in the United States. Soon the style (which had inexplicably become known as "Mission", presumably after the California indigenous architecture, or "Prairie") was more ubiquitous than the then-popular Eastlake. A much-loved ballad of the day hailed "A Bungalow Built for Two" which pretty much summed up the
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