Arts and Crafts Movement Enjoys Orange County Revival

Orange County collectors and homeowners who are exhausted by the “more is more” approach to decorating are turning to furniture and designs of the revived Arts and Crafts movement. Works from this turn-of-the-century movement embraced simple, straightforward designs made of quality material with enduring construction techniques.

Though conceived in Great Britain in 1880, the movement has always been quintessentially Californian. When it held this country in thrall until the Depression, its message was so compelling it brought architects and artisans to Southern California to create straightforward--even humble--designs instead of the gaudy froufrou of the late Victorian period.

Not since then have the furniture, pottery, paintings and other decorative arts of the Arts and Crafts movement seemed such a breath of fresh air.

“To many it may yet be subconscious, but there is a cry among us caught in today’s web of high-tech, high-pressure, sophisticated, complicated lives for something simple,” says Terry Whitcomb, an Arts and Crafts expert at the University of San Diego. “Somehow having in our homes a few beautifully made possessions placed for their function in an austere environment brings us in touch with essentials we don’t want to lose.”

Selected pieces from the movement can be seen through May 26 in “The Arts and Crafts Movement in California: 1880-1918,” an exhibition Whitcomb curated at the Center for the Study of Decorative Arts in San Juan Capistrano.

Among the Louis C. Tiffany inkwells and Ernest A. Batchelder tiles, the California Faience vases and plein-air paintings, are: a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window in his characteristically spare “Prairie School” style; a Gustav Stickley Morris chair with its original, well-worn upholstery, and a rustic Greene and Greene desk impressively carved in clean, Oriental lines.

But the show is not just an ode to the past.

Mining for lost original pieces is hitting pay dirt in Orange County, local examples of the movement’s architecture are being renovated here, and artisans and crafts people work today in local design studios rekindling the Arts and Crafts ideal of quality construction with an emphasis on function, using conventional materials.

“Just as (the Arts and Crafts movement) was conceived as a reaction to an underlying distrust of the industrial age, where we’re heading is drawing us toward the very same objects,” says Leslie Bowman, curator of decorative arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “And with 100 years on them, their comfortable, cozy vernacular seems even more so.”

“Arts and Crafts pieces were created with the spirit that everything (in design) should work together--function and form, a house with its surroundings, a vase with the rest of the room,” says Eric T. Haskell, a Scripps College, Claremont design expert who will speak on “Japonisme in the Arts and Crafts Movement” in a lecture series given as part of the San Juan Capistrano exhibition. “The whole idea is that of a well-made object fitting perfectly into a well-made universe.”

And when that universe is a comfortable living room or relaxing den, the well-made object contributing the warmth, the character and the mood of soothing and informal sophistication may well be a piece of Arts and Crafts.

There’s no question we’re drawn to the work.

In December, 1988, Barbra Streisand paid $363,000 at Christie’s, the New York auction house, for a Stickley sideboard. Her acquisition set a record market price for the movement’s sturdy and supremely clean-lined furniture, and her celebrity was the most visible salute to “a pot that’s been heating up for 10 years, boiling for about five and now is just about to boil over,” according to Ken Roberts, a longtime Brea dealer in early California art and collectibles who recently moved to Palm Springs.

“We’re seeing a lot of first-time buyers who finally are becoming familiar with and appreciating the design of the Arts and Crafts period,” says John King of Butterfield & Butterfield auctioneers in Los Angeles, which last September held its first sale devoted to furniture and other items of the movement.

Jim Cline of The Great Exchange consignment company in Laguna Beach has also seen these buyers: “We get so many requests for Arts and Crafts pieces that we could never get enough in to fill the demand.”

Whitcomb agrees: “Look at the ostentation kick we’ve been on. Can the houses get any bigger or gaudier? People are trying to get back to what might have been.”

In the humble Craftsman bungalow, for example, rows of casement windows would let in the omnipresent western sunshine, sleeping porches would welcome the pure Santa Ana breeze. The garden was integral to their design and these houses’ exposed wood beams, natural stone piers and earth-toned finishes spoke of comfort and simplicity, warmth and informality. Examples of Craftsman architecture can be viewed in Laguna Beach at 290 Diamond Way, 2192 Ocean Way, 466 Aster St. and 155 Sunset Terrance.

Chairs, tables, flatware, textiles, jewelry, artwork and other decorative arts were no-nonsense. They’re rustic in their natural state of unstained white oak or unpainted mahogany. They’re organic in the way vases are glazed to resemble an iris bouquet, or pots are shaped like a squash. And the scenes of plein-air paintings or the designs of stained glass, with wandering wisteria and wind-swept seas, recall the elemental and inspiring presence of nature.

What’s more, with the marks of the coppersmith’s hammer clearly visible in a serving tray, or the dowels, tenon joints and mortises fully exposed in a dining room chair, these Arts and Crafts pieces honored their creators.

“They are,” says Haskell, “objects with a soul.”

And they are treasures that turn up every day, not only at Orange County auctions, estate sales and antique shops where knowledgeable collectors do battle in bidding, but also at garage sales, second-hand shops, flea markets--and for the lucky--in grandparents’ back bedrooms where, when the “quaint” style was taken for granted, they were painted, upholstered, stained or otherwise dressed in unnatural, ill-fitting remnants of trends.

Successful treasure hunts, however, require investigation.

Most original period furniture was signed and a buyer must open drawers or drop to the floor to look in, behind, below or around the furniture for the craftsman’s mark. The same furniture that Stickley painstakingly handcrafted and marked with the motto “Als ik Kan” (As I Can), was so widely copied that even Sears, Roebuck & Co. offered cheap substitutes.

Can’t find the real thing? Switch to reproductions.

At Baker, Knapp & Tubbs in Laguna Beach, reissues of 50 different Stickley bedroom, dining room and occasional pieces are made by the L. and J.G. Stickley Co., which in April resuscitated its Arts and Crafts line. “And these are authentic to a T,” says collector and dealer Alan Eliel of Sun Stone Gallery in Laguna Beach.

An original Stickley spindle settee commands $50,000; its reissue is $1,350. An original tall-case clock has been auctioned at Christie’s for $71,000; its reissue sells for $5,148.

Gregson Hall, 29, of Costa Mesa, fashions many Greene and Greene style pieces. He is the great-grandson of John Hall, the Pasadena man who crafted much of the work for the designing brothers, champions of the American craftsman ideal.

Today’s Arts and Crafts renegades are using Space Age plastics instead of the native woods and high-tech Formica instead of California river stones. They eschew organic shapes and nature scenes in favor of surreal forms. But these potters, jewelry designers, home contractors and other would-be legends of the decorative arts, are still guided by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement.

“A lot of people are shattering conventional ideas about design,” says George Boyd, a Del Mar craftsman who has renovated a number of Orange County interiors in his contemporary Arts and Crafts vision. He used fresh-cut olive tree branches to hold up library bookshelves in a Laguna Beach cottage and in another Laguna showplace he designed furniture in the form of inverted stone pyramids and had crafted a mint green leather couch.

“Today a visionary designer might use Naugahyde, which goes completely against the common idea of ‘Oh! You use Naugahyde. You’re tacky!’ ” says Boyd, explaining that in its current Arts and Crafts interpretation, Naugahyde used as imitation leather is awful, but Naugahyde used as Naugahyde is “wonderful.”

“People were thinking, ‘Oh! You use wood. You’re poor!’ when Greene and Greene started celebrating it,” says Boyd. But the architects “just wanted to say: ‘Look, wood is cool; it’s all in how you use it.’ Well, plastics and synthetics and even Naugahyde are cool. It’s all in how you use them.”