Issue 66 Out Now
We get letters, from time to time, from readers who remember the good old days and wish they’d come back.
You know, the days when Dad built most of the family furniture. When Mom cooked stringed beans and corn she pulled from the backyard garden and then, after the dishes were put away, filled the warm summer evenings with sweet music she played on the piano. When the dinner table featured a butter dish little Amy made in her ceramics class and a handsome, if rustic, lamp Verne, the 12-year-old, put together during a semester when he got to be in both wood shop and metal shop.
That family, and those readers, might want to spend some time with Jeff Bloomer, who lives in the Historic Old West End of Toledo, Ohio. Jeff’s house is the subject of the lead-off feature article in the Summer 2010 issue of American Bungalow, and his guest bedroom graces the cover.
The thing is, Jeff made almost everything you see in that cover photo and in two more of that room inside — the bed, the bedspread, the pillows, the throw-rug, the bedside table, the chest of drawers, the clock, the mirror, the Gustav Stickley reproduction lamp, the Morris chair in the foreground, the folding screen against the wall and the stencil that circles the room just below the ceiling. The only things he didn’t make are the antique phone on the desk, the vintage chair in the corner and the Mica Lamp on the bedside table. Oh — and the framed paintings on the wall, which his friend Holly Branstner made (and framed).
We call the article “The Wealth of Craftsmanship.” We could just as well have called it “The Good Old Days.”
There’s a lot about the old days elsewhere in the new issue, too, starting with Illinois furniture maker Nancy Hiller’s article, featured here online, on the nearly forgotten Harris Lebus Co. of Tottenham, North London, at its peak one of the largest manufacturers of Arts and Crafts furniture in the world.
Then there’s a look back at the creation of Hyde Park, an old downtown neighborhood of Tampa, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, where the oak-lined streets join Bayshore Boulevard and the world’s longest continuous sidewalk. Here is yet another tale of a turn-of-the-20th-century historic urban neighborhood that seemed to have fallen apart during the 1960s and ’70s, only to reassert itself as the century closed and a new one opened.
Another installment in our continuing series on the American Southwest takes us to central New Mexico. There, between 1902 and 1908, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad (now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe) built a series of Mission Revival depots and Harvey Houses along the Belen Cutoff, a cost-saving alternative route between Kansas and California that carried passengers during the heyday of Southwest tourism before it eventually became — and remains today — the Santa Fe’s main freight route between Chicago and the Pacific. The old depots aren’t going anywhere, at least not yet. Might that be telling us something?
In this issue’s Arts and Crafts Profile you’ll meet Rita Rocheford and Colleen Convey, a couple of Minneapolis business professionals who decided 10 years ago to turn years of tilemaking apprenticeship into Rocheford Handmade Tile. That’s their online store where, if you can’t find your question answered on the screen, they write, “For heaven’s sakes, call us.”
Finally, in From Our Friends, Milwaukee-based carpenter and remodeler Dave Miller reflects on the damage that’s been done to old houses in the name of remodeling. Now a serial old-house-owner himself, he’s thankful that today more and more homeowners are turning that around.
As John Brinkmann writes in his Letter from the Publisher, “the legion of bungalow people continues to spread …. To you and me, this arts-and-crafts bungalow life is not about the past, it is the future.”
Table of Contents - Issue 66: Summer 2010
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