Rustic Furniture

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Few of today's rustic furniture makers are country people. They hold degrees from art schools and live and work in town. Their writings reveal little knowledge of the woods or the outdoors—a deficit that is more than counterbalanced by a high-craft knowledge of woodworking and a literate creative sensibility to abstract design inherent in the wood. Instead of furniture featuring stuffed animals or great looming oak burls, you will see soaring, airy designs that are highly individual and at once traditional and contemporary—many exhibit ing a sense of humor, whimsy, and a playful flair for integrating form and function that no Adirondack guide could have imagined. I'd call it Post-Industrial Rustic Modern. Perhaps a little more modern than rustic. Surely postindustrial—what more stinging Generation X-style comment on a perceived decline of industry and commerce, end to affluence, and a reduced hope for the future than to resort to twigs to build high-fashion furniture? What a contrast with the post-WWII optimists and their plastic and chrome.

It All Comes Full Circle

Trends be or no, purely utilitarian rustic furniture has been made over the past 30 years by those of us (many holding art degrees of our own) who chose to quit the city and live in the country without realizing that we were perpetuating a utopian dream or rustic tradition. Rustic furniture for us was and is part of a rural lifestyle choice.

We were and are reacting in part to social, political, and economic forces larger than ourselves. But much of our motivation is a new attitude toward nature. It is based in part on disgust with city filth, crime, and corruption, but not at all due to fear, exploitation, or a mere search for novelty. Rather, we have developed a new appreciation of the (deteriorating) relationship between mankind and the planet.

We are the first to make rustic furniture to use in our own homes and lives, as the pioneers did. But we don't make it because we have no other choice. Nor because rustic is fashionable, or because we think it looks quaint in the garden, or because we get sentimental over trees—but because it speaks to us of wildness and we are the first generation in history to appreciate how mankind has destroyed the globe as we rushed to dominate and civilize it. We also acknowledge the need to preserve whatever vestiges of wildness we find, wherever we find it, and however we can: salmon in Oregon and redwoods in California, the Amazon rain forest, Arctic ice packs, the greensward in Central Park. Yes, and Furbish louseworts, snail darters, and the over-promoted-to-the-point-of-boredom damned humpback whales.

Perhaps, in time, history will give us a proper title like Enlightenment or Romantics. About all I hear these days is Tree-Hugger and Environmentalist Wacko. But that's another subject.

Building Your Own

So what style of rustic furniture would you like to build for your den, back porch, or lawn? Or your living room, bedroom, or study? I've set recycled flat-faced interior doors up on a rustic log frame, plugged the lock set holes, trimmed the edges with halfpoles for a dining room table, and made a set of flat-seated/flat-backed, loglegged chairs to match. I've glued down and spackled smooth the delaminated veneer on an ancient six-drawer sideboard from the dump and covered it with birch bark, half-split wild cherry, and yellow birch twigs. (I was later offered $2,500 for it and took it!) I've disguised stacked-brick and pine-plank bookcases with end piers of vertical sticks and scarfed grooves into horizontal sticks to slip over the fronts of the shelving as book-holding lips.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print