Arts & Crafts
Arts & Crafts Style Qualities
- Natural, Bold, Rustic, Warm, Square
- Natural Materials Honest Craftsmanship
- "The outside of any building may now come inside and the inside go outside, each seems as part of the other." -Frank Lloyd Wright
Houses
Passionate champions of noble endeavor, Arts & Crafts reformers in late-19th-century England reacted against the Industrial Revolution and Victorian-era excess with a new vision of beautiful and useful objects crafted with pride, simplicity, and integrity.
Boosted by a little Yankee entrepreneurship, this vision blossomed in America around 1900 by marrying traditional handcraft with our fondness for nature and labor-saving devices. The forms that resulted — such as Mission furniture and the Craftsman bungalow — were powerful and original expressions of our country's unique character.
Light Fixtures
This style places overt and enthusiastic emphasis on the hand of the craftsperson, and a refusal to disguise it in any way. It delights in the interaction between the maker and the material, free of any artifice.
How does it feel?
Rustic but refined. Honest, human, and handmade. A referendum against a mass-produced, impersonal culture.
Where does it come from?
In many ways, Arts and Crafts was both a social movement and a design style. It was conceived in the early 20th century as a reaction to the often dislocating and dehumanizing effects of the industrial revolution, and mass production in particular. The result is an idealization of the ethics and traditions of handcraft.

