Style Guide: Arts & Crafts
"The outside of any building may now come inside and the inside go outside, each seems as part of the other."
Arts & Crafts
Style Qualities:
Natural, Bold,
Rustic, Warm, Square
Natural Materials
Honest Craftsmanship
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.
Our Arts & Crafts collection reflects the strong influence of a distinctive lighting style known as Mission. Defined by clean, square lines and the warm glow of art glass, Mission lighting emerged about 1905. Its "modern" sensibility remains fresh and adaptable even today (one hundred years later), allowing it to move easily between bold, formal settings and smaller, more humble ones in homes of many styles.