by Christopher Murther, Boston Globe

The velvet rope - usually only employed to protect Anna Nicole Smith, Ashton Kutcher, or Sasquatch from an overzealous public -  sits imposingly in front of the moss green wall. Behind the rope and the wall lives the superstar of this year's High Point International Home Furnishings Market: The premiere home collection from a designer who passed away nearly 50 years ago.

Despite the small matter that Frank Lloyd Wright designed his Prairie collection at the turn of the last century, his pieces were some of the most innovative on display in the acres of furniture at this year's High Point Market. Wright's collection was just the beginning of the Mission-style explosion at High Point, the biannual market where the country's leading furniture makers premiered their newest offerings for buyers and journalists.

By preternatural coincidence, a half-dozen furniture makers rolled out lines this spring that incorporate elements of Arts and Crafts and Mission styles -  furniture that is marked by fine wood and simple lines. While several of the mammoth showrooms looked as if they had been assembled by followers of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, less clear was why a show that is intended as a harbinger of living rooms and bedrooms of the future was looking back 100 years at the Arts and Crafts movement.

read the rest on the Halifax Chronicle-Herald site - the Boston Globe doesn't allow free access to its archives.