Stick Chairs and Folk Furniture
Category: Make it yourself, Buy Secondhand
Search the right antiques stores, or enter the right terms in eBay, 1st Dibs and beyond, and you’ll soon find raggedly old wooden chairs going for thousands of pounds, euros or dollars. When I say raggedy, I mean chairs that look like they were designed freehand by a three year old. Is it wonky, dad? Who cares, son, you’re amazing. I’m going to give it three legs. Great idea, why not? I want to paint it red. No, green. No, both. Go for it, champ.
That might sound dismissive but I actually I love them. Like this stool I posted to Instagram a while back, there’s something appealingly unpretentious about these chairs. They were made to perform a function with, apparently, little or no concern as to how they looked.
At least, that’s what I like to think. Also, their “ugliness” and focus on functionality perhaps aligns them with a modernist, brutalist aesthetic which, as you can probably tell, is right up my street.
As you might have guessed, this interest, and the fact that they are relatively simple in design, has prompted people to make their own. You often see them referred to as Welsh stick chairs but there are Irish equivalents and English versions and, no doubt, something similar in many other countries.
My way in was via Christopher Schwarz’s Lost Art Press which, alongside reissuing old instructional books, publishes an always interesting blog and online video courses. They love a stick chair and have republished John Brown’s seminal guide, the appropriately named Welsh Stick Chairs. (If you fancy an original signed copy, there’s one currently available on eBay.)
Impressive though the Lost Art Press approach is, I prefer the more rustic, knock-it-together-quickly style of the antique versions. I like that the type of old chairs now appreciated by collectors appear to be constrained by the skills the maker had (or didn’t have) and the materials that were readily available. These were days before B&Q. Eoin Reardon takes a similar but contemporary approach in this lovely video:
While this could be relevant to all four Diktats of Decmatic, I’m writing about these chairs now for the Make it Yourself thread. I love nerding out to pictures of beat-up old stick chairs occasionally because - apart from just appreciating them - they’re a great reminder that I shouldn’t stress that the dining table I made has warped. (I think the timber guy sold me green wood, but I would say that, wouldn’t I? It couldn’t possibly be my sketchy carpentry skills, obviously.) The table might have become wonky and gappy but it’s still beautiful and comes with a personal story that makes it unique.
My wonky, gappy table top
So go grab your tools or book a day in the community workshop and get making. Who cares if it’s not perfect? It will be yours and it will be unique.
Happy building!
PS: if you want to investigate buying originals, try these places, where all the above photos come from: Lorfords, Exceptional Objects, who specialise in primitive antiques, as they call them, and auction houses like Mallams 1788.
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