During his first years as an Arts and Crafts furniture maker, from about mid-1900 to early 1904, Gustav Stickley and his designers created the most significant cabinetwork his firm would ever
produce. For the most part made of quarter-sawn American oak, this furniture was substantial, subtly proportioned, essentially rectilinear, and built using traditional joinery--for instance,
tenon and key, dovetail, pinned through tenons--and employing hand-wrought copper or iron hardware. These structural elements were both functional and symbolic, literally holding the furniture
together while also expressing its moral aesthetic: though a factory product, every piece was solidly, honestly made.
Stephen Gray is among those few who, early on, recognized both the inherent beauty of Arts and Crafts furniture and the value of the Craftsman Ideal. His collection includes many of the rarest
forms and has few equals, but in two regards, it is almost singular: Stephen Gray lives with this major collection and has embraced the Craftsman Ideal in a beautiful, simple, personal,
regionally sensitive manner. He lives in a nineteenth-century country house and has integrated an important collection with the ideas of decorating, lifestyle, and sensitivity to environment
that were central to the Craftsman enterprise. Through Stephen Gray's collection, it is possible to explore the disparate values of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Arts and Crafts interior,
and the tensions inherent in the pursuit of an aesthetically simple Ideal life.
This lavishly illustrated book features Stickley's furniture, including many photographs of Stickley designs in use, and it also includes some fine examples of art pottery, lighting fixtures,
tiles, and color woodblock prints. The essays by David Cathers on Stickley's early work and Tommy McPherson, who compares Stephen Gray's living room to Stickley's own living room at Craftsman
Farms, put Stickley's work into perspective. The introduction by Stephen Gray touches on collecting and living with Stickley.
