Gustav Stickley

• Gustav Stickley
• Born: March 9, 1858
• Died: April 21, 1942

Furniture craftsman, home designer, and editor, was born in Osceola, Wisconsin, the eldest son of Leopold Stoeckel and Barbara (Schlager) Stoeckel, of German heritage. His father, who changed the family’s name to Stickley, was a stonemason of modest means. Stickley left school at the age of twelve to work as a mason’s tender and learn his father’s trade. By the time he was seventeen he was employed as a journeyman stonemason.

The family moved to Brandt, Pennsylvania, about 1875, and Stickley went to work in his uncle’s chair factory there. Within four years he had taken over the business and, with his younger brothers Charles and Albert, formed the firm of Stickley Brothers, which relocated in the early 1880s to Binghamton, New York, at that time a flourishing wholesale and retail furniture center. Stickley became involved in the development of electric streetcar transportation in Binghamton and was the operator of the first electric streetcar in America. He married Eda Simmons of Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, in September 1887.

Mostly self-taught, Stickley was influenced by the writings of the critic John Ruskin, who articulated the connection between design and values and developed a theory of political economy based on the moral requirement of enabling workers to perform valid and fulfilling work, and of the historian Thomas Carlyle, who believed that the world has an obligation to alleviate the suffering of the poor and that human progress depends on the upper classes’ fulfilling this obligation. These ideas, combined with his own interest in architecture and the decorative arts, stimulated him to seek to improve the American home and thereby to uplift and improve family and community life.

By 1900 Stickley had traveled to Europe and studied art nouveau in France, Germany, and Austria. Back at his factory, he began making chairs by hand in traditional English and American colonial styles, then experimented with his own designs, which he named Craftsman furniture. Unlike the popular Victorian style, with its ornate trimmings, shiny varnished finishes, and plush upholstery, Stickley’s Craftsman pieces had unadorned rectilinear lines, utilitarian fabrics, and a simple stained finish, which he called “weathered.”

Stickley first showed his handcrafted designs at a semiannual furniture exhibition held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the summer of 1900. The new style, known as Mission furniture because it imitated the heavy, unpolished wooden pieces made by journeymen for Roman Catholic missions in Mexico during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became very popular in all classes of homes throughout the country; many second-rate, machine-made copies were turned out by imitators who lacked Stickley’s principles. Stickley established the Craftsman Workshop in Eastwood, New York, where, in addition to furniture, he produced hand-fashioned metalwork, embroidery, textiles, leather, and home furnishings.

Stickley founded the Craftsman in October 1901 and remained its editor and publisher until it ceased publication in 1916. The magazine, which featured articles on living and working conditions in tenements and factories alongside pieces on flower arranging and glassblowing, achieved nationwide circulation.

In 1902 the Craftsman began printing home designs produced in the Craftsman Workshop, with plans for both exteriors and interiors. The following year Stickley formed the Craftsman Home Builder’s Club to provide free information about what he called “well-built, democratic, well-planned homes”: small, uncomplicated cottages built with inexpensive local materials to a standardized scheme. Mail-order firms such as Sears, Roebuck and Company sold complete materials and fixtures for Craftsman bungalows that could be assembled by do-it-yourself homeowners. “It seemed a large contract for one man to undertake the task of laying the foundation of a style that should meet the needs of this age and express the dominant characteristics of the American people,” Stickley wrote in 1909. But, he added, he had “behind him the collective thought and common sense of the people, which in the long run is unerring, and which alone can give life to any form of art.” He published two collections of house plans, Craftsman Homes (1909) and More Craftsman Homes (1912).

Like the progressives, whose goals for housing reform included improved health and sanitation, more efficient housekeeping, and the possibility of home ownership for even the humblest of working families, Stickley believed well-made homes to be indispensable to the solution of such social problems as crime, to which overcrowded slum living is a contributing factor, and unemployment, which would be relieved by strong construction and furniture industries. The change to small, more easily managed homes was also influential in the development of the feminist movement, as it freed married women to enter the work force.

Stickley died in Syracuse, New York, at the age of eighty-four.

There is no full-length biography of Stickley, and details of his personal life are scanty. Material on his life and work can be found in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 14 (1910); J. Freeman, The Forgotten Rebel: Gustav Stickley and His Craftsman Mission Furniture (1966); G. Wright, Building the Dream (1981); M. A. Smith, Gustav Stickley, the craftsman (1983); J. J. Bavaro and T. L. Moss-man, The Furniture of Gustav Stickley (1982); and H. Bin-stead, The Furniture Styles (1909). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, April 22, 1942.