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Mission Furniture and the Arts and Crafts MovementTYPE "MISSION" INTO OUR SEARCH BOX OR CLICK ON THE BUTTONS AT THE LEFT TO SEE OUR MISSION FURNITURE SELECTION
What came to be known as Mission style furniture, originated in the western United States in the mid-1890's and was manufactured, mainly in the east, until about 1915. It is rumored that the Mission furniture style began when members of a church in San Francisco were unable to afford to buy furnishings for their church. They decided to build their own, imitating the work of Indian craftsmen who built furniture for the Spanish mission stations in Mexico and in the western and southwestern parts of the U.S. A decorator sent models of the pieces made for the church to Joseph McHugh, a manufacturer in New York, who began to produce his own versions of this solid, simple furniture.
Close to the time that Mission furniture was becoming popular in the western United States the Arts and Crafts movement in Europe had gathered steam. The Arts and Crafts movement is interesting in that it involved two transitions. One part of this transition was the emphasis by designers of the Arts and Crafts furniture on function and unadorned beauty over the ornate styling of the Victorian era. The other part of the transition was coupled with the social reform taking place at the time. The ideals of social reformers, including designer William Morris, were influential in creating a new aesthetic in which their notions of good design were aligned with their concept of a good society. Manufactured goods of the period were often poor in design and quality, and factory workers were brutalized by harsh working conditions. Reformers proposed that with the revival of individual craftsmanship, the individual's quality of life would improve and shoddy mass-produced goods would be replaced with beautiful objects created by skilled hands.
The designs and reforms of the European Arts and Crafts movement and the Mission style of the western United States reached the eastern United States at about the same time. American furniture designers in the east and Midwest merged the two into the American Mission style which has continued to be popular and has actually become increasingly popular in recent years.
The Mission style furniture of the time was constructed almost exclusively of weathered or fumed oak, and characterized by straight lines, and mortise, tenon, and dowel joinery. While Mission style furniture was usually free of ornamentation, large nail heads, simple cut out patterns or hand-hammered copper appliqués were sometimes used for decoration. Mission furniture, then and now, is characterized by straight, clean lines and the simple appeal of quarter-sawn white oak with features of joinery, including through tenons, corbels and butterfly joints.
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