Staked Stool Project
Staked Furniture
I assume you are here because you're interested in the staked furniture I'm exploring or maybe just to see whatever it is I made. In any case, enjoy.
While I got my start producing furniture by making stuff to use at SCA events, I've grown interested in historical furniture in general. Turns out there were lots of interesting things made between the Renaissance and the advent of industrial furniture making (about 1850 in England and America).
Lately, I've read a lot about late 17th, 18th, and 19th Century vernacular furniture. This is the stuff the common people made and used. Because of the preservation bias of high-style items, what you see in museums and historic houses, cause folks to think that the 18th Century was all mahogany high boys and cabriole feet. Sure, it was...for the well to do, that early 1%. For the rest of the folks, it was a little more mundane.
What is staked furniture?
Staked Furniture is a form of vernacular furniture prevalent from ancient times right through to the Industrial Revolution especially in Europe and America. Its defining characteristic is that the item is based around a thick slab of wood as the central structure. Let into this slab are the legs and, depending on the item, other things like a back.
Much medieval furniture is staked. Basically, all stools that depend on the seat for structure, many of the tables, including trestle tables are staked as well as all known workbenches from Roman times to the 15th Century. To give you an idea, below is a sampling from our German friends in 15th Century Nuremburg.
This is in contrast to the other main way to make chairs, building off of the rear leg frame. Most high-style chairs were made in this way as they were deemed more refined and lent themselves to various forms of decoration that followed the fashion of the day. And it continues to be a dominant form today. Examine the Philadelphia Chippendale Side Chair below. Notice how the rear legs and connecting pieces create a frame that extends from the floor all the way to the crest rail (top). That rear frame is the structural heart of the chair. You hang a seat frame off of that and tuck a couple of legs under it to get a chair. Included in the gallery below is a modern chair showing how that form remains in fashion, and just to show that it isn't limited to prissy Philadelphia chairs, a Norwegian chair.
Staked chairs are different. Instead of building around the rear frame, the chair (or table or whatever) is built around a think plank. This is the seat in a chair or reinforced sections of the top on a table. Legs are mortised into the plank and the back/arms (if any) are also mortised into it, but separately from the legs. Examples of this style are Windsor chairs and their tough country cousins, the Welsh stick chair. See below for a few examples
Making a stick chair is a significantly different enterprise than back chairs. For one thing, you need relatively few tools. You are not limited to dried timber. You can use green wood. You don't even need all four legs. You get by fine with just three and that has the advantage of being stable on uneven floors (as might be typical in rural or lower class homes). You also don't need to be quite as fussy with the angles things connect at. Back chairs have to be built with a certain level of precision or they will quickly fail. Stick chairs are sturdy and if they require repair, it's usually a simple matter. Or it's firewood.
Stick chairs were not typically decorated. No carving at all. Maybe paint. Usually, they were just buffed to a high sheen by generations of butts and beer farts.
My Stuff
This is where my recent work comes in. Mostly, I have built boxy 'normal' furniture with careful joinery. Leaning to make staked furniture means acquire a few new skills and leaving the safety of right angles. Scary.
New tools: Reamer, tenon cutter, lathe
Skills: conical tenons, laying out compound angles, USING the new tools including finally spending enough time with the lathe to get a starting skill level.
Vernacular Furniture
Vernacular Furniture is a term used to describe items of furniture made in local rather than cosmopolitan traditions of design and construction. They were intended for everyday use and reflect the direct needs of ordinary people’s lives. Vernacular furniture is thus part of the culture of communities, and its place and function achieve meaning as a direct reflection of the context and use for which it was made. This is in opposition to "high style" or cosmopolitan styles which changed as fashions changed in the urban centers. Vernacular furniture changes very slowly, if at all. It's a product of the people and the environment in which it is made. And as such, changes when those conditions change rather than ephemeral urban fashions.
Books Read
- Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown (Christopher Williams, Lost Art Press, 2020)
This book was my first exposure to John Brown. He was a Welshman who plied various trades in his life until he settled on making stick chairs. His inspiration came from one he spotted in an antique shop and resolved to learn to build these chairs and sell them. Along the way over the next 30 years or so he basically revived the craft and inspired many other chairmakers around the world to take up this form. He wrote a short book (see below) and he wrote columns for the British woodworking magazine Goo Woodworking for many years. He was quite an interesting character. This book is by someone who was basically an apprentice who approached JB and asked to learn how to make these chairs and ended up spending the next decade working with him. The book covers their time together and walks you through the entire process including tool and stock selection. So, in that sense, it is a woodworking book, but there are no measured drawings in it. It's something of the philosophy of making these chairs that no two are alike. In fact, John Brown insisted that even when he tried, he couldn't do it. So you can use this book to make a chair, but you won't be following a recipe. I found the book very fascinating. It's what got me really interested in chairmaking in particular and led me to explore vernacular furniture. I read it in 2 days? I think. For a pretty thought-provoking book, that's very fast. - The Welsh Stick Chair: A Visual Record (Tim and Betsan Bowen, Pethe Press, 2020)
A smallish book by the owners of one of the better known Welsh antique dealers. After decades in the business, the authors provide an interesting cross-section of the many variations on the Welsh Stick Chair. Over 100 color (or as they would say colour) photos. This will probably become good source material for designing chairs down the road. - Welsh Stick Chairs (John Brown, 1990, reprinted Lost Art Press 2020)
Not sure how to classify this book. It is nominally a guide to building Welsh Stick Chairs, but it's not a how-to. You see all the steps, and it's probably enough if you're an experienced chair builder (I'm obviously not). It's also part philosophy. Kind of like some of James Krenov's books. It's not a long book, but you do get some insight into the notoriously cantankerous Welshman. - The Anarchist’s Design Book Expanded Edition (Christopher Schwarz, Lost Art Press, 2019)
After 20 or so books, Chris Schwarz can put together a good how-to woodworking book. Lots of photos, a couple of drawings, a couple of smart-ass remarks, and just enough prose to tell you everything you need to know to actually build the projects. Add to that some contextual and philosophical interludes and you have a really excellent book on a sampling of staked and boarded vernacular furniture from the 15th to 21st Centuries.
At 644 pages, it covers a lot of ground and includes, much like Galbert's book below, all the tools and other information you need if you are just starting out. But this is by no means a beginner's book. The early projects are simple, designed to introduce skills you'll need to complete the more complex projects later on. This is the book I've been following in learning the whole complex angle things.
LAP offers most of their books in print and (DRM free) PDFs. This is one you'll want in PDF as well. I kept my old 2nd gen iPad Air when I got a new one (with actual battery life) and it lives down in the shop where being plugged in a lot isn't a liability. Much easier than working with printouts that fly around when you fire up O'l Breezy and get the table saw going. The only downside is that I don't have very distinct fingerprints at the best of times and in the shop, dry and rough wood means I pretty much have none, so unlocking the damn thing is a PITA. - Chairmaker’s Notebook (Peter Galbert, Lost Art Press, 2019)
I can't recommend this book highly enough. It may be the best-written and illustrated woodworking book ever. Maybe the best in any craft. Using just this book, you could select materials and tools and set about building a Windsor chair from a log. It has everything you need. There are two complete chair projects that between them give all the skills you need to make all the common Windsor forms. Also available separately are full-size drawings of all the components, especially useful for the turnings.
But it's not just that it's thorough. It's well written in an unpretentious style like you are speaking to a fellow woodworker who's enthusiastic to share his specialty with you. For the purposes of education, it's fortunate that Peter is a gifted illustrator. There are over 500 pencil sketch drawings in the book, at least one per page, all done by him. And, on the correct pages, a rarity in book layout. Really, it's awesome. Windsor chairs are not on my radar at this time, but I still enjoyed the book and learned some stuff anyway. - Windsor-Chair Making in America: From Craft Shop to Consumer (Nancy Evans, UPNE, 2005)
Nancy Evans is to American Windsor Chairs what Victor Chinnery is to English Oak Furniture. This book might weigh more than his 2nd Edition of Oak Furniture - The British Tradition. And it's actually the 3rd (and final) volume in her series on the form (the other ones are: American Windsor Chairs (1996) and American Windsor Furniture: Specialized Forms (1997)). Unfortunately, such a specialized, in-depth, and academically-oriented work did not have a large print run. It's like its predecessors, it's quite expensive when you can find it.
The first volume is an encyclopedic examination of the Windsor chair from its introduction into America from England in the 1730s with extensive documentation on the spread and variations of the form. At 744 pages, it has over 1000 illustrations and is 10 lbs. by itself (someone on Amazon gave it one star because it was too heavy). The second volume on specialized forms is only 256 pages as it just covers derived furniture like writing chairs and settees.
This 3rd volume, however, is back to 500 pages, hundreds of illustrations, and close to 10 lbs. But this is the one that appeals more to the furniture maker (or just woodworking enthusiast). You'll just need to read it at the table.
With exhaustive documentation, the author sets the context for chairmaking in Colonial and Federal America. Sections on: wood types and distribution, the types of craftsman making chairs including example apprenticeship papers and legal contracts, the socio-economic setting for this type of furniture, the role mechanization played in furniture making in the early-middle of the 19th Century, etc. It's pretty stunning in scope and thoroughness. Each chapter has hundreds, several hundreds of endnotes. The author scoured much primary source material putting this together. If you wanted to take a deep dive into some esoteric aspect of chairmaking in Colonial America, this is a pretty good place to start.
