Immovable Furniture

Think them ingenious, historic, or simply charming, millwork built-ins are an essential part of the Arts & Crafts house.

- Mary Ellen Polson

Those surviving bungalow and Craftsman builtins are economical with space and functional in design. A buffet recessed into a dining-room wall eliminates the need for a butler’s pantry. A bench tucked against a staircase creates a place for rest or dropping a package in a narrow space. Bookcases make excellent use of the dead space on either side of a chimneybreast. Stacked drawers convert voids in knee walls into useful storage.

Perhaps the most elegant built-in is the colonnade, an architectural feature composed of a pedestal or partial wall—anywhere from knee to above-chest height—topped with a column or post. Colonnades typically appear as pairs in the form of room dividers, bisecting a long narrow living room and effectively turning it into two cozy, well-defined spaces within an open plan.

Colonnades are the built-ins most likely to be missing or damaged in an old Arts & Crafts interior. (That’s true also of breakfast nooks, which often have been converted to powder rooms, or obliterated during kitchen expansions). If there is no colonnade in a house ca. 1900–1929 where the entry door opens directly into a long, graceless living room without a proper foyer, that’s a telltale sign a colonnade may have been ripped out. Damage or patches in the wood flooring near the midpoint of a room point to the same conclusion.