Rustic Furniture

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By the late 1800s, the new industrial superrich heard the call of the wilderness and began escaping hot city summers first by taking camping trips into the Eastern wilderness; then by building 30-room vacation homes in mountain and lake country from the upper Midwest to the Shenandoah Valley and Adirondack Mountains. The style of architecture and furnishings that the Vanderbilts and Jay Gould had duplicated in their vacation retreats weren't ornate European copies to match their pre-in come tax "gilded age" (so named by Mark Twain). The new "dollar aristocracy" broadened the scope of the rustic style that had originated in China, came to America via English gardens, and was interpreted by society architect Frederick Law Olmstead in the pavilions and benches for Central Park, the "greensward" he designed for the middle of Manhattan Island.

Many 30-room "great cottages" were located a day or more away from any railroad terminal, so they had to be built from what was available—wilderness forest products. In a rustic elegance never equaled, the homes were built of logs with great porches and huge rock chimneys, all set into gem-like lake settings.

Making the rustic furniture to furnish the estates quickly became a genuine American primitive art form, as it was built in the winter by unschooled wilderness guides who interpreted Central Park settees, arbors, chairs, and pavilions using skills developed in building guide boats, hunting shelters, and (truly) rustic camp furniture.

At first, this "twig" furniture was crude and for outdoor use only, but it quickly became refined and was brought inside to a new room concept: the "den:" Guides combed the woods for unusually shaped branches. Over time, they bent, grafted, and deformed trees into intricate designs—including entire living chairs. A favorite theme was to adorn, say, a hat rack with a stuffed bear cub or another of the trophy animals the "resorters" murdered wholesale before President Theodore Roosevelt began to popularize the need for natural resource conservation with his initiation of the National Park System.

URBAN CHICFew of today's rusticfurniture makers arecountry people.

Copying the superrich, the not-so-rich and not-rich-at-all established resorts on lakes, the ocean, and in the mountains all across the country—until the Crash of 1929. Each resort region had developed its own style of rustic resort furniture by then and during the Great Depression of the 1930s, original Adirondack- style furniture (some sold by homeless itinerants and called gypsy-rustic) as well as Southern bent-willow and Indiana hickory-sapling furniture were made by out-of-work countrymen. Some is still made commercially today.

The Urban-Rustic Style

Arguably the most true-to-tradition modern interpretations of original Adirondack rustic designs are being made by big-city artisans who sell it as folk art to other city folks at prices that would make J.P. Morgan blink. I'm told there are rustic furniture boutiques on 5th Avenue in New York City—J.P would certainly approve.

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