High-Touch, High-Tech

Some call it Mission furniture and others use the term Craftsman, but whatever the moniker, furniture dealers around Los Angeles agree that it’s hot and getting hotter.

“Anything to do with the Arts and Crafts Movement is extremely popular right now. We have trouble keeping it in stock,” Alan Butler, owner of Old Friends, a Canoga Park antique store, said.

Craftsman-style furniture dates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is known for simple lines, functional design and finely crafted hardwoods--mostly white oak. Buyers and sellers alike see its growing popularity as a welcome antidote to the early 1980s industrial look.

“It’s the warmth of wood as a reaction,” Butler says, to the sterility of high-tech. “What I sell is high-touch.”

To complete the rustic feeling, many dealers also stock hand-hammered copper bowls, brightly colored California pottery and local landscape paintings. But the Arts and Crafts Movement actually began in England in the mid-1800s as a reaction to the lush ornamentation of neoclassic and neo-Gothic styles. By the late 1800s, it flourished in hamlets like Pasadena, where artists fashioned finely turned handicrafts, and in Upstate New York and Michigan, where old mills turned out the tables, rockers and desks that fetch such fancy prices today.

Simplicity isn’t cheap: At Buddy’s, in West Hollywood, prices range from $200 for a leather-upholstered footstool to $3,000 for a signed table or bookcase, including several pieces by revered Craftsman artist Gustav Stickley. At Old Friends, prices are more down-home. Butler’s Canoga Park stock runs from $200 to $500 a piece, and none of it is signed.

Dealers say prices have risen sharply in the past few years and predict the trend will continue.

“This is nice stuff, early 20th-Century American furniture, and we’re running out of it,” Buddy’s owner, Buddy Wilson says.

The Craftsman craze may grow even bigger this month, when an exhibit titled “The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920” arrives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show is courtesy of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Already, Valley antique dealers say that more and more Westside yuppies are making the trek to Canoga Park’s antique row in search of Craftsman treasures.

“Lots of non-Valley people are looking for Arts and Crafts furniture, and they want to know what I have,” Butler says.

Wilson adds: “Every time you pick up an interior design magazine, there’s someone’s house full of it.”