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 and 18th Century vernacular furniture. This is the stuff the common people made and used. Because of the preservation bias of high style items and what you see in museums and historic house, many folks think the 18th Century is 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.

"Nice" chairs (including almost all High Style) are built off the rear legs and most chairs are still made this way today. If the rear of the chair extends from the floor all the way to the crest rail (top), this is what I am talking about. That rear frame is the structural heart of the chair. You hang a seat frame off that and connect a couple of legs to that and you have a chair.

Staked furniture is 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.

Staked furniture isn't limited to seating and it wasn't a "new" invention. A lot of 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.