Arts & Crafts Bridal Chest
Contrasting woods highlight the elegant
lines of this Gustav Stickley-designed classic.
I
n days gone by, a chest similar to this would contain a bride’s dowry. The form
goes back to Gothic times , but this is an adaptation of a Gus tav Stickley piece
from 1901. Admiring the lines of this piece, I was curious to see how the design
would look with contrasting materials, not the usual Craftsman dark oak. The
panels are quilted bird’s eye maple, and the other parts are Jatoba, also known
as Brazilian cherry.
The original was made of quartersawn white oak with wrought-iron braces
on the corners. What makes this unusual for a Stickley design are the decorative
corbels on the panels. These also appeared on a few dining room case pieces
made in the early 1900s.
Decorative cur ved element s in Stickley furniture are usually associated with
Har vey Ellis , who worked for Stickley in 19 03. This design appeared well before
Ellis worked for Stickley, and before Stickley wrote against using purely decora-
tive elements in his furniture catalogs.
Stickley doesn’t always get the credit he deserves as a furniture designer.
Building this bridal chest with non-traditional materials takes his design out of
the Craftsman context, and shows Stickley’s remarkable sense of line, propor-
tion and texture.
In many of the original bridal ches t s I have seen, the center panels have
cracked. I think the corbels are the culprits, keeping the solid-wood panels from
expanding and contracting in the grooves of the stiles. To avoid this problem, I
decided to use veneered panels. The veneer is on a core of^1 ⁄ 2 "-thick Medium-
density Fiberboard (MDF), and the backing veneer is sycamore, a less-expensive
alternative to the fi gured faces.
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