I've said it before: oh, how I love Portland's Rejuvenation Hardware. Not only do they have one of the best collections of period Arts & Crafts lighting available anywhere (all of which is sold through their wonderful catalog, which I always look forward to!), but they also have a wonderful showroom in Portland. The showroom, though, sells an awful lot more than just lights and hardware. Furniture, signage and mantels, grills and registers, architectural salvage - all sorts of treasures! Flickr user Madduxdavid recently visited the shop and took these great pictures - you should stop by, too, if you visit Portland.

Flickr user Ceriess has a gorgeous collection of Grueby, Faience and other A&C pottery; I'm also trying not to be jealous of the beautiful Stickley bed, magazine rack and other furnishings in his especially attractive 1910 San Francisco home (and that view!).

In the previous three installments [ 1 / 2 / 3 ] on this subject, I've concentrated for the most part on vendors of salvaged materials in the United States. However, the UK has more architectural salvage specialists per capita than any other country, from what I can tell, and some of these folks are selling really incredible stuff - fireplaces and stone/tilework from old demolished (or collapsed) castles, perfectly good roofing materials from 200-year-old rowhouses, statuary and plenty more. Here are a few such dealers in England:

• Rose Green Tiles & Reclamation in Fishponds, Bristol has building materials and plenty of ornamental features. A large selection of hard landscaping items and timber, too.
• Manchester's In Situ, which sells everything from salvaged flooring, entryways, old doors, paneling, railing & gates, windows & frames and more.
• Cawarden's motto is "destruction to construction," and it's certainly apt. Their Rugeley, Staffordshire stockyard is the largest vendor of reclaimed bricks in the Midlands, and also have an enormous stock of beautiful old doors.
• I may have mentioned Bygones before, but the fact that they are one of the largest reclamation yards in the UK makes them important to note again. Their Canterbury warehouse & yard is simply enormous, with lots of stone and ironwork, and an especially large stock in fireplaces and associated goods.
• London's Westland sells high-end salvage - rococo and gilt, built-in furniture and cabinetry, and lots of statuary.
• West Yorkshire Architectural Antiques & Salvage is pretty self-explanatory. Stone statuary, gates, radiators and a pretty broad range of fireplaces, chimneypots, finials and stained glass round out their stock.
• Andy Thornton is also in West Yorkshire, with a showroom and warehouse in Halifax. They sell mostly new furnishings to pubs, hotels and the like, but also have a good-sized stock of architectural antiques.
• Cronin's Reclamation & Solid Wood Flooring sells flooring, of course, as well as a range of flagstone, as well as furniture, fireplaces, doors, oak beams and plenty more. They have a showroom in Little Bookham and a yard just off the M5 in Nr Ilminster, Somerset.
• Abbots Bridge Reclamation in Bury St. Edminds, Suffolk have both garden ornaments and furniture as well as interior goods - fireplaces, stoves, flooring and more.
• Ace Reclamation in West Parley, Dorset, buy & sell a range of architectural antiques and building materials. Their jam-packed yard is full of oak and pine flooring, over 400 doors, sinks, radiators, plenty of period bathroomware and plenty more.
• Drew Pritchard, in Llandudno, Conwy, specializes in stained glass and a particularly high grade of architectural antiques.
• Ribble Reclamation's motto is "from a single roof slate to an entire Victorian church" and they are not kidding. Everything under the sun in their huge stock. They are located in Preston, Lancashire.
• Dorset Reclamation has a nice-sized yard and shop in Wareham, selling such a wide range that I couldn't begin to list it all here. Suffice to say there's an enormous range of finials and garden statuary, lighting, wall times, flooring, doors and plenty more. Mill wheels? They got 'em.
• Retrouvius, on Kensal Green in London, is both a salvage and design firm.
• Heritage Reclamations in Sproughton, Suffolk have an extensive stock of period ironwork, reclaimed materials and interior fittings. They are just outside Ipswich.
• Romsey Reclamation at the Romsey Railway Station in Hants have thousands of railway sleepers and plenty of other building materials - timbers, flooring, bricks, roof tiles and plenty more.
• Gardiners Reclamation in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire also specialize primarily in building materials, with plenty of roofing, various types of brick and architectural stone, paving, cobbles, and plenty more.
• South West Reclamation in Bridgwater, Somerset have a very well-organized yard full of roofing, building materials and various architectural antiques.
• Hingham, Norfolk-based Mongers Architectural Salvage deal in windows & art glass, doors & door furniture, garden statuary, gireplaces and reclaimed flooring.
• Wilson Reclamation Services are in Nr. Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria and specialise in antique and some reproduction statuary, urns and garden planters. They also have a decent-sized stock of doors, paneling, oak beams, flagstones, etc.
• Architectural Antiques have a small storefront in Hammersmith, London. They specialise in English and other European chimneypieces, mirrors and various other architectural artefacts and also maintain an appointment-only warehouse in Paris.
• Drummonds Architectural Antiques have shops both in Hindhead, surry and Chelsea, London. Their Surrey shop contains more than 80,000 square feet of goods, ranging from antique baths and fireplaces to reclaimed flooring and other building materials.
• The Minchinhampton Architectural Salvage Co. in Nr. Stroud, Glos., sell large items (decking, bridges, columns and more) as well as a wide range of interior items, from period fireplaces to entire paneled rooms.
• Walcot Reclamation in Bath sell garden features, architectural joinery, doors, ironwork, grates and whole period bathrooms. They also have a depot nearby specialising in paving, stone, bricks, tile and other outdoor and garden features.
• IBS Reclaim are near Oakley village on the Bucks / Oxfordshire border. They have a large stock of church pews, floor boarding, yellow and red stock bricks, roof tiles, Cotswold building stone and plenty more.
• Traditional Welsh Salvage in Neath, South Wales, deal in just that - materials saved from demolished churches, schools and other period buildings. Stained glass, wood, stone and church fittings especially.
• Tina Pasco sell primarily garden furniture and various historic landscaping materials from their Wingham, Kent yard.

Almost every one of these dealers adheres to the SALVO code, although I suggest that if you would like to be safe in the knowledge that you are buying materials that are not stolen and were responsibly removed, that you read about the code here and make sure companies you do business with adhere to it. Look for the Salvo crane logo to be sure.

It's December, and you're looking for that perfect gift, maybe a piece of furniture or a lamp or something for the Craftsman aficionado in your family. You don't have time to wait for shipping - you've gotta find something nearby. So you visit craigslist.org, fire up  your home city, and find...

• a Stickley Bros. Quaint Furniture lamp table in mint condition: $1500, Los Gatos CA
• matching Gustav Stickley armchair & small rocker: $699 for both, San Francisco CA
• refinished 1912 side chair: $345, Burlingame CA
• 3-piece (settee, rocker, armchair) repro Gustav set: $2300, San Francisco CA
• oak slat umbrella stand: $250, Danville CA
• Gustav Stickley rocker: $300, Boston MA
• Mission wall clock, brass numbers: $150, Boston MA
• four-drawer tiger oak dresser with mirror: $400, Boston MA
• small oak writing desk: $195, Boston MA
• attractive library desk with shelves, chair included: $200, Boston MA
• another library desk, this one by L&JG Stickley: $1200, Los Angeles CA
• wooden Stickley lamp with red mica shade: $300, Los Angeles CA
• 1000 sq ft of redwood block flooring: $4-6/sqft, Los Angeles CA
• Mission foosball table??: $600, Milwaukee WI
• Stickley Quaint Furniture writing desk: $450, Manhattan NY
• nice Stickley oak panel loveseat (but please use better fabric!): $4500, Philadelphia PA
• double fixture & pendant by my favorite lighting manufacturer/retailer, Rejuvenation: $87 / $129, Portland OR

from Preservation Online:

Three months ago, Katrina's storm surge swept a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed cottage in Ocean Springs, Miss., off its foundation, destroying one of its wings and damaging most of the rest.

Now the 115-year-old beachfront bungalow, part of a National Register Historic District, is facing a final blow:
A FEMA-hired engineering firm has declared the Charnley Cottage and its octagonal guest cottage "not reasonably restorable," which means FEMA could demolish the houses in the next few months.

contact the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy if you are able to help.

Beyond the Bungalow: Grand Homes in the Arts and Crafts Tradition, Gibbs Smith, 2005.      

Paul Duchscherer's latest foray into bungalowbilia doesn't really deal with bungalows at all.  His Beyond the Bungalow (brightly photographed by Linda Svendsen), on the heels of his earlier The Bungalow (1995), Inside the Bungalow  (1997), and Outside the Bungalow (1999), examines, as its subtitle explains, grand homes in the Arts and Crafts tradition. An effort at nomenclature as well as explanation, this latest volume classifies and describes those larger-than-bungalow homes that share, in their design principles and philosophy, at least a family resemblance to the, if you will, basic bungalow.

While some might question denying big homes the bungalow rubric (Duchscherer recognizes the problem given the majestic Greene and Greene "ultimate bungalows"), he makes a strong case for recognizing separately the relevance and beauty of those two and three-story large footprint houses of the 1900-1930 era that so impressively remind us of the best of American pre-Depression residential architecture. His typology of the big home is fourpart - The American Foursquare, The Rustic Home, Craftsman (which he describes as classic Arts and Crafts), and Craftsman Crossovers, with its own nine subcategories: Swiss Chalet, Oriental Style, Prairie, Shingle, Colonial Revival, Mission, Spanish Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, and English Cottage Style. Each type is described generically and illustrated with exemplar cases.

The book, certainly a handsome volume, is saddled with an unfortunately undersized type, and a rather abrupt ending. A useful list of open-to-the public historic homes is appended.

Sorry for the weird hiccup today. Temporary service interruptions have become de rigeur with our host in the last several months, but this one seems to be over now and we're back up and running - hopefully for the forseeable future.

Margarette Frederick, Adjunct Curator of the Delaware Art Museum's Bancroft Collection, has written us an excellent introduction to their currently-touring Pre-Raphaelite collection. Please do try to see this show if you get a chance; it shines a light on the formation of the Arts & Crafts movement and its intersection with the premiere fine art movement of the era, and is chock-full of some really stunning paintings and a wide range of decorative items.

Waking Dreams: the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Delaware Art Museum, an exhibition of pre-Raphaelite paintings, drawings and arts and crafts, is currently touring the United States. The exhibition, now on view at the McNay Art Museum in San Antoinio TX, will continue on to the John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota FL, opening January 28, 2006 (closing April 2, 2006). The exhibition features 130 objects, forty of which are Arts and Crafts.

In 1848 a group of seven young British artists and writers gathered together in mutual support of new directions in contemporary art – in a move away from the established London art institutions of the day. The group consisted of the artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and James Collins; the sculptor Thomas Woolner; and the writers William Michael Rossetti (brother of Dante Gabriel) and Frederick George Stephens. Looking back to art created before the time of the Renaissance artist Raphael, their primary aim was to paint directly from nature in an honest manner that rejected the painterly brushwork and contrived compositions currently in vogue at the Royal Academy.  The bright jewel-like color and close attention to detail, typical of early Italian art, featured prominently in their work.

Late in 1856 William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, students together since 1853 at Oxford University, met Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three men bonded in their enthusiasm for art and literature of the Middle Ages, in particular for Mallory’s “Morte d’Arthur.” At the end of 1856 Morris and Burne-Jones moved into Rossetti’s old rooms in Red Lion Square, London. Morris set about designing furnishings which were then ordered from a local cabinet maker. Two of the painted chairs from this suite are featured in this exhibition. The decoration is loosely based on the poetry of William Morris. The earliest chair, painted at the end of 1856 is taken from Morris’ poem Rapunzel and depicts Gwendolen in the witch tower with the Prince below kissing her long golden hair This chair includes Morris’ calligraphy, “Glorious Guendolen’s golden hair” referring to lines from his poem. The second chair, The Arming of a Knight, depicts a medieval woman bestowing her glove of “favour” on a knight. These chairs and the design of this furniture signal the beginning of Morris’ engagement with the decorative arts. Shortly thereafter (1861), Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company was founded and the Arts and Crafts movement was born. The decorative arts included in this collection represent a broad survey of works produced in England in the 19th and early 20th century.

The history of the Delaware Art Museum’s pre-Raphaelite collection is a landmark in American 19th century art patronage. Samuel Bancroft, the Quaker, the Wilmington-based textile mill owner reminisced that in 1880 upon viewing his first Pre-Raphaelite he was “shocked with delight.” Bancroft’s decision to collect Pre-Raphaelite art was highly unusual, both within the local community and in the United States as a whole. Even today, his collection, bequeathed by his descendents to the Delaware Art Museum in 1935, is one of only a handful in the United States focusing on British Art of the 19th century.

Exhibition venues and dates for Waking Dreams following the Ringling Museum showing include: Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa OK (April 22 – July 2); Frick Art and Historical Center, Pittsburgh PA (July 29 – October 8); Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati OH (October 28 – January 7, 2007); Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis MO (2007 February 3 – April 15); San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego CA (May 5 – July 15, 2007). The collection will re-open in newly renovated permanent collection galleries at the Delaware Art Museum in the Fall of 2007.

For further information regarding the Bancroft collection and or the Waking Dreams tour please contact Margaretta S. Frederick, Adjunct Curator, Bancroft Collection, Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington DE; 302.351.8518; [email protected].

Thanks to the Delaware Art Museum for the image above. William Morris, 1834-1896 /  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828-1882: Glorious Gwendolen's Golden Hair, 1856 painted deal, leather, and nails Delaware Art Museum, Acquired through the Bequest of Doris Wright Anderson and through the F. V. du Pont Acquisition Fund, 1997 / 1997-13

Niki Hayden has a short article in Front Range Living on Bungalow 811, which was relocated from the University of Colorado campus to the Chautauqua community in Boulder recently and fits in perfectly with the other brown & white homes there. The structure itself held up remarkably well from the quick move, which took place from 1 to 3 am not log ago, but has seen a serious internal (and external) overhaul since then. Local designer Dorothy Tucker got the job of designing a period-perfect interior to match the others in the community, a task which she discharged quite well. The total cost of moving and renovating the bungalow came to $200,000 - a number impressively low when you see the amount of work put into the almost all-new interior. Boulder-based ceramicist Sue Walsh produced the original tiles - loosely based on Batchelder designs - which are a perfect fit for the rest of the inside.

The bungalow itself is available for rent to Boulder visitors, and opens to a wonderful view and a number of nearby hiking trails.

Ukiah, California's Sun House is a 1911 redwood Craftsman bungalow, open to tours Wednesday through Sunday, and managed by the same folks who caretake the nearby Grace Hudson Museum. The house has been maintained quite well, and is full of items from the very eclectic Hudson family collection, including many reminders of their very "bohemian" lifestyle. The bungalow, California Historical Landmark #296, is most certainly worth a visit if you are driving through Ukiah. Hudson's western art may seem just slightly treacly and dated now, with super-romanticized views of Native American life, but her collection of Pomo (and other) artifacts is right at home in this rough-hewn Craftsman masterpiece. Of course, it is ironic that her work is now seen by some folks as overly sentimental, when at the time she was criticized by much of the fine art establishment for spending so much time with and befriending many local Pomo tribespeople and painting a subject that her contemporary critics thought to be somehow "unworthy."

I found this photo album - a half dozen pages of pictures of various bungalow (and other historical) kitchens culled from books, magazines, newspapers and websites - earlier today. There is some junk and a number of images won't be especially interesting to A & C homeowners, but if you're planning a kitchen remodel - as I am - you'll find plenty of interesting ideas here.

Author and very accomplished furnituremaker Darrell Peart wrote up a short note about his new book, Greene and Greene: Design Elements for the Workshop, which will be released by Linden in April 2006. You can preorder Darrell's book now from Amazon using the preceding link, or find it at your local bookstore after that date. Just as Darrell's advice is invaluable to the woodworkers on the Greene & Greene furniture listserv that I subscribe to, this book promises to be a tremendously useful (and very affordable!) resource to any furnituremaker interested in Greene & Greene style and techniques:

With a series of fully illustrated step-by-step procedures my book offers the reader instructions for producing the essential Greene and Greene details.

• cloud-lifts
• Blacker leg indent detail
• ebony buttons (plugs)
• exposed ebony spline and breadboard construction
• Blacker Pull
• Blacker brackets
• relief detail

The book also includes background information on the designers of the furniture, Charles and Henry Greene, and the craftsmen who built the furniture, Peter and John Hall. Just as Charles and Henry (Greene) were in many ways opposites, so it was with Peter and John (Hall). Their strong and weak points complimented one another. I have included examples of personal work by the individual Hall brothers. Some of my thoughts on the design process are included as well as examples of G&G inspired work by contemporary furniture makers.

I encourage readers of my book to use the information given as a starting point to create their own designs using the G&G vocabulary. Some of my thoughts on the Design process are included as well as examples of G&G inspired work by contemporary furniture makers. I encourage readers of my book to use the information given as a starting point to create their own designs using the G&G vocabulary.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust is now selling a line of furniture (mostly mirrors so far) in typical Wright Prairie designs. A baby-sized barrel chair and adult-sized bar furniture in the same design;  a "George" chair and "Adia" side table; a large and very solid mahogany dining table and chairs.

Yet another great Treadway/Toomey Gallery auction. Unlike Sotheby's (who are having a great Greene & Greene auction in a few weeks, but I can't link to them since they now require registration just to browse lots), TT doesn't require you to jump through hoops to view what's coming up. A few highlights from their upcoming December 4 20th century art & design auction (or view the full catalog):

• a number of green Van Briggle [1 / 2 / 3]  and Rookwood vases;
• a very pretty Newcomb College vase / bowl, in a high gloss glaze;
• some great Fulper and Dedham high-gloss pieces;
• a range of tall Teco vases, including a particularly rare William Dodd design;
• some terrific Stickley chandeliers [1 / 2];
• several bits of particular nice Tiffany glass;
• well-kept Stickley sideboards and dressers;
• an unusually decorated partners' desk;
• several pieces of salvaged Prairie windowglass [1 / 2];
• a very unique Benedict Studios mica shaded desk lamp;
• a Dirk van Erp woven-willow wastebasket;
• and a very pretty Arts & Crafts settle.