Country Collectors Espy Mission Oak Furniture : Lifestyle: Antique furniture from America’s turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts Movement is the ‘new’ country collectible.

No-frills mission oak furniture, expensive green pottery and hand-hammered copper lamps--symbols of America’s Arts and Crafts Movement from the turn of the century--share an honesty of design and workmanship that appeals to today’s country collector.

According to Country Home magazine, no longer does Arts and Crafts furniture languish dusty and unnoticed in the back of junk stores and antique shops.

It seems fitting, now that Americans have entered the last years of the century, that interest has again turned to the most popular furnishings of the first decade of the 1900s. With its no-nonsense rectilinear designs, the mission oak furniture of the Arts and Crafts Movement is now revered as the first glimpse of modernism in America. Some art historians see the American Arts and Crafts Movement as the most successful attempt at creating a truly national aesthetic in the arts.

The current trendiness of Arts and Crafts is surprising when one considers mission furniture’s uncompromising simplicity, its dark stains and heavy woods.

The furniture was made to be integrated with linens, rugs and lighting to create an atmosphere that energizes rather than enervates.

The best evidence of the renewed popularity of Arts and Crafts is the astonishing rise in prices in recent years. A factory-made Gustav Stickley bow-arm Morris chair that sold for a little more than $500 in 1980 will bring more than $5,000 in New York galleries this year.

Although best known as a school of design, the Art and Crafts Movement was actually a far-reaching philosophical movement that embraced even such social issues as education and labor reform.

The philosophical groundwork was laid in the middle of the 19th Century with the writings of Englishmen John Ruskin, William Morris and others. Morris, considered the father of the Arts and Crafts Movement, not only rallied against cheaply made and poorly designed products, but created his own designs and set up a workshop that produced a wide range of handcrafted objects. He wanted to create art that would be a part of everyday life.

In America, the Arts and Crafts Movement began with an emphasis on craftsmanship, but here philosophy was quickly transformed into fashion. Established in 1895, Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft Shops began as a crafts guild based directly on Morris’ model. Hubbard first produced hand-printed books but expanded to leather work, copper wares, furniture and textiles.

Similar to Hubbard, Gustav Stickley cleverly advertised his Craftsman Shops furniture and popularized the Arts and Crafts aesthetic through his magazine, the Craftsman. Although they never acknowledged one another, Stickley and Hubbard were most responsible for making Arts and Crafts the country’s most fashionable style of home decorating.

Stickley’s furniture was blatantly copied by dozens of other manufacturers, including the several companies operated by his four brothers. Still, his furniture epitomizes the mission oak look and is widely considered the best of the style with respect to both design and construction.

For many years, the designs of two of Gustav’s brothers, Leopold and John George, were considered mere imitations of craftsman furniture. Recently, however, the brothers have been widely credited with designs and construction details that are in some ways superior. Their company, L. & J.G. Stickley, introduced the highly regarded prairie settle and tall case clock in 1910, a time when craftsmen offered little that was innovative.

Not all Arts and Crafts furniture had the mission look, however. Frank Lloyd Wright’s fame as an architect generally eclipses the fact that his furniture fits snugly in the Arts and Crafts framework; he even designed what he called a mission chair.

If the many companies imitating Gustav Stickley’s designs contributed to his bankruptcy in 1916 (changing fashion also had a lot to do with that), they also produced much of the furniture that can be a relative bargain for the Arts and Crafts collector.

Because of the simplicity of mission designs, only slight variations make the difference between an important piece and one that is far less valuable.

One easy indication of a design likely to be valuable is the presence of an arch. Whether an arched toe board on a bookcase or sideboard, an arched apron on a footstool or chair, or arched arms on a chair, the presence of that subtle break from straight lines usually adds a refreshing dimension to a mission design. Generally speaking, wider stretchers are better than narrow ones, and more slats are better than fewer.

Construction also indicates value. The best pieces of mission furniture are pegged rather than nailed. They may have exposed mortice-and-tenon joints, chamfered boards or butterfly splines.