When I started hunting for Antiques I was in Chicago and still very young. I found myself looking through some of the best Antique dealerships in Oak Park and that’s where I began my relationship with the Mission or Arts and Crafts Style Lamp. I began searching for quartersawn oak lamps and looking for the best grain patterns and the best styles. Years later I had started my own craftsman studio where I found myself searching through big piles of rough quartersawn oak at some of Michigan’s best lumber mills and selecting stacks of boards I would take home and plane, sand and cut into little pieces. I would then take the little pieces of wood, group them into little kits arranged by the best tiger-stripy patterns and assemble them into lamps that I wanted for my Livingroom.
Later I began to realize that other arts and crafts enthusiasts liked the lamps too, or I would and sometimes people didn’t even know they were arts and crafts fanatics until they saw my lamps. I would catch people looking closely at the grain patterns and following the tiger stripy patterns around the lamp proclaiming that it appeared the lamp must have been made from 1 single board.
