Sideboard

This jarrah sideboard was designed by James Walter Chapman-Taylor in about 1910, and is an excellent example of custom-made furniture by New Zealand’s most ‘emphatically devoted’ Arts and Crafts practitioner (Lloyd Jenkins 2004, 29). The sideboard has a plank top and plank side supports with arched tops, a central frieze drawer above an open kennel, two full-length fitted cupboards, and original hand-wrought iron handles and back plates.

Arts and Crafts

The Arts and Crafts movement began in Britain in the 1850s and 1860s, but as historian Douglas Lloyd Jenkins notes, it ‘could not have been better tailored for adoption in the colonies’ (Lloyd Jenkins 2004, 15). Guided by William Morris and John Ruskin, proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement sought a return to the principles and values of the Middle Ages, promoting honest craftsmanship and a simple, uncluttered country life.

This proved an attractive proposition to designers and craftspeople in New Zealand, many of whom saw themselves as building a ‘Better Britain’ free from the ills of the industrial world. The designs produced under the banner of Arts and Crafts were diverse, but the uniting characteristic of all of this work was ‘its rejection of industrial manufacturing and the machine, and its overarching preference for the home-made’ (Lloyd Jenkins 2004, 15).

Chapman-Taylor

Born in London in 1878, James Walter Chapman-Taylor came to New Zealand as a child and was raised on a farm on the Ngaere block near Stratford. As a teenager James was apprenticed to a local builder, and in 1903 he enrolled in an architecture and design course run by the International Correspondence Schools in Pennsylvania. In 1909 and again in 1914 he travelled to England to view the work of architects he admired, and gradually he developed a mature, cohesive and consistent style.

Chapman-Taylor’s houses are distinguished not so much for their planning but for ‘the intensity with which [they] were imbued with Arts and Crafts attitude’ (Lloyd Jenkins 2004, 30). His homes, which drew inspiration from English cottage style, were characterised by their whitewashed walls, hand-adzed features, large beams and lintels, small-framed windows and hand-crafted fittings. Although Chapman-Taylor preferred to use materials found close to or on the site of the building, it was his love for and use of Australian jarrah that came to characterise his work.

Tirohana

Like many Arts and Crafts architects, Chapman-Taylor designed both in-built and freestanding furniture for his houses. This sideboard was made for the Chapman-Taylor-designed cottage commissioned by Jessie McKellar and Henry Abraham in 1909.

‘Tirohana’, built on Jubilee Road in Khandallah, was a four-roomed home with timber features in jarrah and oregon, panelling and beams throughout, and hinges and latches of iron. According to the Abraham’s daughter Caroline, ‘much furniture was also jarrah and hand-made by Chapman-Taylor – in the living room, the inglenook, the window seat, the long, hanging shelves for ornaments and the curtain rails; upstairs the built-in dressing table; the stairs too … C-T also made some moveable furniture … in jarrah and with rough-adzed technique and slotted joints’ (Siers 2007, 87-88). Many of these pieces were designed for the Abrahams and were not replicated in other houses. Smooth-planed timber was used, not the carefully hand-adzed timber for which Chapman-Taylor was later known.

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