Typical Adirondack chair in eastern Ohio

Rustic furniture is

furniture Furniture refers to movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating (e.g., stools, chairs, and sofas), eating ( tables), storing items, eating and/or working with an item, and sleeping (e.g., beds and hammocks) ...

employing sticks, twigs or logs for a natural look. The term “rustic” is derived from Latin “rusticus” (peasant; as opposed to urban). The style is rooted in Romantic tradition. In the US it is almost synonymous with the

National Park Service rustic National Park Service rustic – sometimes colloquially called Parkitecture – is a style of architecture that developed in the early and middle 20th century in the United States National Park Service (NPS) through its efforts to create building ...

style of

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings ...

. Many companies, artists and craftspeople make rustic furniture in a variety of styles and with a variety of historical and contemporary influences.

History

The rustic furniture movement developed during the mid- to late-1800s. John Gloag in “A Short Dictionary Of Furniture” says that “chairs and seats, with the framework carved to resemble the branches of trees, were made in the middle years of the 18th century, and there was a popular fashion for this naturalistic rustic furniture” in England. Sue Howard Stephenson explains in her “Rustic Furniture” (1979) that the movement was actually a revival of European styles introduced during the Romantic movement and actively reproduced in America by 1840. In the 1870s there were several American firms specialized in rustic furniture. High-quality rustic furniture was produced in

Adirondack Mountains The Adirondack Mountains (; a-də-RÄN-dak) form a massif in northeastern New York with boundaries that correspond roughly to those of Adirondack Park. They cover about 5,000 square miles (13,000 km2). The mountains form a roughly circular ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

for woodland camps of wealthy city dwellers. The most familiar modern form of this style is the

Adirondack chair The Adirondack chair is an outdoor lounge chair with wide armrests, a tall slatted back, and a seat that is higher in the front than the back. Its name references the Adirondack Mountains. The chair was invented by Thomas Lee between 1900 and 190 ...

. The style became popular at the end of the 20th century when a number or

Great Camps __NOTOC__ The Great Camps of the Adirondack Mountains refers to the grandiose family compounds of cabins that were built in the latter half of the nineteenth century on lakes in the Adirondacks such as Spitfire Lake and Rainbow Lake. The cam ...

(

Camp Pine Knot Camp Pine Knot, also known as Huntington Memorial Camp, on Raquette Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, was built by William West Durant. Begun in 1877, it was the first of the "Adirondack Great Camps" and epitomizes the "Great Cam ...

, Kamp Kill Kare,

Camp Uncas Camp Uncas is an Adirondack Great Camp, the second built by William West Durant for his own use. It lies on the shore of Lake Mohegan, near Great Camp Sagamore, and was completed in two years. Previously Durant had built Camp Pine Knot, w ...

and

Great Camp Sagamore Great Camp Sagamore is one of several historic Great Camps located in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York State. History Great Camp Sagamore was constructed by William West Durant on Sagamore Lake between 1895-1897. Prior to Sagamore, ...

) were built. It was also adopted by the

National Park Service The National Park Service (NPS) is an agency of the United States federal government within the U.S. Department of the Interior that manages all national parks, most national monuments, and other natural, historical, and recreational properti ...

. The first and largest manufacturer of such furniture was Old Hickory Furniture Co., established in 1890. Historical examples of rustic furniture may be found in museums and antique shops, although fine historical pieces are rare outside a museum setting. One showcase for this style of furniture is the

Adirondack Museum Adirondack Experience (formerly Adirondack Museum), located on NY-30 in the hamlet of Blue Mountain Lake in Hamilton County, New York, is a museum dedicated to preserving the history of the Adirondacks. The museum is located on the site of an hi ...

(Blue Mountain Lake, New York), which hosts annual rustical furniture fairs. The

New York State Museum The New York State Museum is a research-backed institution in Albany, New York, United States. It is located on Madison Avenue, attached to the south side of the Empire State Plaza, facing onto the plaza and towards the New York State Capitol ...

is home to "Rustic Furniture: The Clarence O. Nichols Collection".

Style

Harvey H. Kaiser in his article "The Adirondack Rustic Style" published in 1983 at

The Old-House Journal ''The Old-House Journal'' is an American magazine that specializes in information about the restoration of old houses. Its first issue was published in 1973 in Brooklyn, New York, as a black-and-white, advertising-free newsletter for devotees of ...

argues that however “some link the style to European influences (particularly Apline

chalet A chalet (pronounced in British English; in American English usually ), also called Swiss chalet, is a type of building or house, typical of the Alpine region in Europe. It is made of wood, with a heavy, gently sloping roof and wide, well-suppo ...

s)... fundamentally, it’s the logical, inevitable convergence of local craft traditions and readily available materials.” As such various rustic styles reflect the personality of their maker, with techniques such as

chip carving Chip carving or chip-carving, ''kerbschnitt'' in German, is a style of carving in which knives or chisels are used to remove small chips of the material from a flat surface in a single piece. The style became important in Migration Period meta ...

, silver or gold brushwork,

milk paint Milk paint is a nontoxic milk-based paint. It can be made from milk and lime, generally with pigments added for color. In other recipes, borax is mixed with milk's casein protein in order to activate the casein Casein ( , from Latin ''caseus'' " ...

, peeled bark and other decorative enhancements. Rustic furniture can sometimes refer to furniture displaying a distinct lack of craftsmanship involved. Quite often, you will find untreated/minimally-treated logs sold off as 'rustic' pieces of furniture commanding prices vastly in excess of their more modern, polished looking counterparts. Whilst some may say more of the raw material is utilized in the crafting of more 'solid' looking pieces of furniture, it may also be argued that the labour costs involved in the manufacturing of such pieces indicates a vast inflation of sold unit prices, if fully taking into consideration actual costs of labour time and raw materials involved. It widens the definition of the word 'furniture' from that of a well crafted, polished-looking product derived from a raw material, to almost any sample of raw material or timber minimally shaped to fulfill the basic purpose of the named furniture type (e.g. untreated sawn tree stump sold as a rustic coffee or bedside table). A recent trend in rustic furniture design is

recycling Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. The Energy recycling, recovery of energy from waste materials is often included in this concept. The recyclability of a material depends on its ability t ...

pallet A pallet (also called a skid) is a flat transport structure, which supports goods in a stable fashion while being lifted by a forklift, a pallet jack, a front loader, a jacking device, or an erect crane. A pallet is the structural founda ...

s to make furniture.

Construction

Typical items of rustic furniture include chairs, love seats, tables, desks, smoking stands (often with a cabin on top), clocks,

chest of drawers A chest of drawers, also called (especially in North American English) a dresser or a bureau, is a type of cabinet (a piece of furniture) that has multiple parallel, horizontal drawers generally stacked one above another. In American English a ...

, rockers, coat racks, mirror frames, beds and lamps. Many different wood species were used including

willow Willows, also called sallows and osiers, from the genus ''Salix'', comprise around 400 speciesMabberley, D.J. 1997. The Plant Book, Cambridge University Press #2: Cambridge. of typically deciduous trees and shrubs, found primarily on moist so ...

hickory Hickory is a common name for trees composing the genus ''Carya'', which includes around 18 species. Five or six species are native to China, Indochina, and India (Assam), as many as twelve are native to the United States, four are found in Mex ...

, mountain laurel, and Alaska cedar. In the American South, palm fronds were occasionally employed. There are two basic types of rustic-furniture construction:

bentwood Bentwood objects are those made by wetting wood (either by soaking or by steaming), then bending it and letting it harden into curved shapes and patterns. In furniture making this method is often used in the production of rocking chairs, cafe ...

(sticks are harvested fresh or steamed to make them supple, then bent into a variety of structures and decorative shapes) and twig work (sticks – straight, curved or forked – are assembled into structures and decorative shapes within a structure). Sometimes both types are used in the same piece. Some rustic furniture makers use

mortice and tenon A mortise and tenon (occasionally mortice and tenon) joint connects two pieces of wood or other material. Woodworkers around the world have used it for thousands of years to join pieces of wood, mainly when the adjoining pieces connect at right ...

construction; others simply nail or screw members together.

History

Style

Construction

References

Further reading