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AROUND HOME : Bent-Wood Furniture

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CITY SLICKERS HAVE always yearned to return to nature: not to rough it on roots and berries, mind you, but to indulge in romantic fantasy. Marie Antoinette and her attendants, for example, fled the formality of Versailles by play-acting as milkmaids and shepherdesses at Le Hameau (the Hamlet)--a sanitized, Disneyland version of a farm village on the palace grounds. And in New York, a century ago, when the Vanderbilts, Whitneys and Rockefellers weren’t summering at Newport, R.I., “cottages,” they’d migrate to sprawling great camps in the Adirondack Mountains. Inspired by the primeval pine forests, the camps boasted log walls, porch railings and gables fashioned from branches, fireplaces made of rough stones pulled from nearby brooks and even spiral staircases winding around a tree trunk.

The style trickled down in the first decades of this century; soon even families of modest means set up summer housekeeping in bungalows in the Catskills. Old-timers in Old Forge, N.Y., writes Craig Gilborn in “Nineteenth Century Furniture,” recall hickory furniture arriving by the boxcar, bound for hotels and places with alliterative names like Camp Kill Kare. To meet this demand, factories such as the Indiana-based Old Hickory Furniture Co. produced tables, settees and rockers by the thousands. There, men bent immature saplings into shape on metal frames. Using the company’s 1901-patented bark-splitting machine, women and children cut the bark into strips, soaked it to make it pliable and weaved it into chair bottoms and backs. (Old Hickory’s 1922 catalogue lists 120 items, from a $4.25 dining chair to a $300 summerhouse 12 feet in diameter with floor and shingled roof.)

Intellectuals in the arts and crafts movement (exemplified by Greene & Greene’s Gamble House in Pasadena) were won over by the product’s “personality and air of definite sincerity,” as the Craftsman magazine put it. Today, we too cherish Adirondack furniture for its “look of the hand”--the perfect foil to our otherwise high-tech houses, filled with CDs, VCRs and PCs. (This is not the Adirondack chair commonly recalled and so widely popular and available now in stores and catalogues.) The woodsy pieces still wistfully conjure that delightful, incongruous moment in America’s history when robber barons, attired in white tie and tails, sat at tables set with linen, silver and crystal, amidst knotty, log-finished walls.

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Daniel Mack offers a light, lacy collection of rustic twig furniture updating the klunky, massive pieces made for the Adirondack great camps 100 years ago. Mack’s prices range from $600, for a bark chair, to the peeled and polished chair auctioned last year at the American Crafts Museum for $4,000. A self-styled “twigmeister,” he eschews nails, instead fastening the old-country way with mortise and tenon, drilling with an antique hand auger. He culls the saplings himself from Sterling Forest in Upstate New York or from clients’ land. More than just the grain markings of ordinary milled-wood furniture, his twig creations bear the imprint of a grazing deer, a curious woodpecker or a hail of hunter’s buckshot.

Authenic Adirondack pieces show up only occasionally in Southern California antiques stores. La Lune manufactures bent-willow furniture similar to this type of Adirondack furniture. It is available through designers and architects from JANUS et Cie in the Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles. Catalogues of Daniel Mack’s rustic furnishings can be seen at Nomad in West Hollywood and at Couturier Gallery in Los Angeles.

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