Furniture as artistic expression

A bed isn’t merely a bed when a custom craftsman builds it. It’s an heirloom invested with history and tradition.

“Art. Function. Heirloom” is the motto of artisan Stewart Crick, whose professional moniker is Stu’s Woodworks. Working out of a converted garage in a sublimely forested area of Manassas, he gives full credit to the Arts and Crafts movement for being his technical and spiritual guide. He explains on his Web site (www.stuswoodworks.com) how these words (“three philosophies”) embody a value system he assumes his clients share.

The Arts and Crafts movement is associated with early-20th-century American craftsmen who sought a fresh approach beyond the outmoded Victorian styles inherited from Europe, where the movement had its roots.

Its heyday was between 1910 and 1925, roughly between art nouveau and art deco periods, when its denizens sought to integrate machine-made production with individual interpretation in all aspects of domestic design.

In this country, the term often is used loosely to embrace trends still current in some circles in architecture, furniture and decoration.

Mr. Crick and Arnold d’Epagnier of Colesville, both self-taught devotees of the aesthetic — although in different ways — are among about 75 artisans participating in this year’s Philadelphia Invitational Furniture Show, which takes place this weekend.

The show, an annual event targeted at serious buyers and collectors of custom furniture, is both a display venue and retail store. It differs from other craft shows by focusing largely on a single design field rather than embracing craftsacross the board. Custom-made lamps and pillows are included, for instance, but not jewelry.

One of the largest shows of its kind in the East, the event gives the public a chance to see the latest work of favorite craftsmen and meet new ones as well. Styles on view range from traditional Shaker to more novel contemporary modes.

Mr. Crick has spent the past month preparing for the event by fashioning an original take on a bed design that he calls “Arts and Crafts inspired.” It will travel in the van with him to Philadelphia along with some other pieces and be offered for sale at $4,000 or slightly more, a price he considers reasonable by standards of handcrafted work.

The bed is a sturdy queen-size piece made of quartersawed white oak, polished with tung oil and then varnished. Its prototype is a slightly different one Mr. Crick made for his own home and is a design he is happy to reproduce in different sizes on request.

Other of his pieces start at $750 for an end table and $1,700 to $2,300 for a coffee table.

He says he is keeping his prices low until he is better known, having taken up the profession full time just 18 months ago after a career as an electronics technician in the Navy, followed by a stint as a management consultant and part-time college teacher. A native of Clifton, he had no special background in woodworking, although he knew he enjoyed working with his hands and spent time in his youth watching his father in his woodworking shop.

He learned the essentials by “going to Hechinger’s,” a former local do-it-yourself chain, “and asking questions” when he rebuilt an 80-year-old house in Hampton, Va., to make it livable by “first stripping it down to the studs.”

During his final tour of duty with the Navy in the early 1990s, he went to school at night and worked in his shop on weekends. Later, he attended a three-month furniture-making course at North Bennet Street School in Boston, founded in the late 1800s to teach immigrants the skills needed for bookbinding, cabinetmaking and violin making.

Modest and articulate, Mr. Crick says he considers his chief influences to be some well-known American members of the Arts and Crafts movement, such as the brothers Charles and Henry Greene and Gustav Stickley. Like them, he focuses on what he calls “honest lines, simple curves, guided by nature and natural forces, and patient attention to details.”

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