Step inside the living room of the chestnut-and-cedar shake log house that Gustav Stickley built in

The living room of the log house: Fireplace with large hammered-copper hood (background); Gustav Stickley, hexagonal library table (foreground), c. 1905–09, oak, chestnut and leather.

1911 in the rolling hills of northern New Jersey, and the first thing that strikes you is the sheer size of the space. Measuring 20 feet wide, the room stretches, unobstructed, the full 50-foot length of the house, typical of the open floor plan that Stickley favored. Its dimensions notwithstanding, the room, furnished with a partner’s desk, a piano, bookcases, an oversized Eastwood chair and tall-back sofas known as “settles,” provided a warm and welcome space for the designer, his wife, Eda, and their six children. The settles were made to trap heat thrown from the impressive fireplaces—10 feet wide and built of fieldstone gathered from the property—that dominated each end of the room.

On the copper hood over one hearth Stickley had etched an engraving: “By hammer and hand do all things stand.” The adage captures an essential belief held by the patron saint of the American Arts and Crafts movement, a belief expressed in his ample homestead.

Conducting a tour of the property that Stickley called Craftsman Farms, executive director Arlette Klaric explains Stickley’s creation of a space at once abundant and intimate. “He has scripted a lifestyle of what you do in the living room,” she says. “What the Stickleys are promoting are stay-at-home activities.”

In its heyday, Craftsman Farms consisted of 10 buildings, including a horse stable, a cow barn and

The dining room of the log house: Corner cabinets (background), c. 1910–11, oak with copper hardware; reproduction area rug by Del Martin, based on the original, 2006.

a silo, on 650 acres. Stickley designed the property to be self-sufficient, with orchards, gardens for vegetables and flowers, and all manner of farm animals. Cabins were constructed for (and sometimes by) the young men who came to Craftsman Farms to learn to make furniture or to find work as farm hands. The property represented Stickley’s interpretation of the Arts and Crafts ethos as a functioning ideal for all aspects of life, and from 1901 to 1916 he communicated his vision in the pages of The Craftsman. The monthly magazine promoted the designer’s furnishings and home designs, whose heavy block forms, rectilinear dimensions and natural wood stains suggested a back-to-nature simplicity. “A world of strife shut out,” reads an engraving over another of the five fireplaces inside the big log house, “and a world of love shut in.”

In Stickley’s mind, Arts and Crafts provided not merely a method for producing furniture or pottery or lighting or even entire homes. It was a means of self-transformation, a guide for living a proper life filled simultaneously with pursuits of the heart, the head and the hands. “He was creating a credible fiction that people bought into,” Klaric says. “Stickley created the myth, and his audience lived out the myth. Had it not been viable, he wouldn’t have been successful.”