by Joseph B. Platt  Delineator Magazine November 1933
 

We celebrate Thanksgiving in Delineator Institute of Interior Decoration this month by laying a feast of fine American furniture before you. And we are greatly honored. For it is Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt who presides over our feast--- and it is she who has provided it.

It is made-by-hand furniture in which the wife of President Roosevelt is so deeply interested. Val-kill is the quaint old Dutch name of the industry---and its cottage headquarters and its workrooms are part of the beautiful Roosevelt estate, overlooking the Hudson River in Hyde Park, New York.

We have all learned this past summer how house guests of the Roosevelt’s are invited to the “cottage” for tea---and for a swim in the pool there, including a spirited game of water polo, in which President Roosevelt often joins. This cottage is the center of Mrs. Roosevelt’s furniture project which she started some years ago to provide work for unemployed men and women of the Hyde Park vicinity.

But what is the furniture like? Where can it be seen? What is the full story behind the adventure? And what is the cost of the furniture?

These were questions we at Delineator longed to have answered.

In the New York showroom of that famous American decorator, Elise de Wolfe, we found the answers to the first two questions. For there, many of the Val-kill pieces are on exhibition and sale. The entire collection of Val-kill furniture can also be seen and purchased, of course, at the Val-kill headquarters at Hyde Park. Their perfect workmanship and everlastingly beautiful design--- American in its finest expression through and through--- so impressed us that at once we set to work to share them with all our readers.

Mrs. Roosevelt, when consulted, approved of our plan. With Elise de Wolfe’s cooperation we photographed the two rooms---a combined living room-dining room, and a bedroom---shown on this page. In both rooms, all the wood furniture is from the hands of the Val-kill village craftsmen.

And then, in answer to our third question---what is the real story behind this furniture adventure? ---Mrs. Roosevelt herself gave the full and satisfying answer. We are happy to be able to set it down for you in her own works:

“When I first started the Val-kill shop on the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York” she says, “I had no idea this venture of reproducing early American furniture would develop. We began with one room for our workshop, and one workman---and a great many dreams. Many of our dreams have come true, and many unexpected pleasures have appeared in the last few years.

“At first back of the desire to produce really beautiful things, lay another motive. For some years I had been rather intimately acquainted with the back rural districts of our state, and realized very clearly the problems of country life. If it were possible to build up in a rural community a small industry which would employ and teach a trade to the men and younger boys, and give them adequate pay, while not taking them completely from the farm, I felt that it would keep many of the more ambitious members in the district, who would otherwise be drawn to the cities.

“It was with this in mind that we decided to make furniture our test case. And every year we have added more space and more workmen. While it is still a very small factory which depends on expert craftsmen to turn out the work, we have managed to employ workmen in the district and train them to our needs. A great many young boys have been employed in various capacities---mostly in the finishing department, and it is in them that I really take the greatest interest, because inherently they are particularly adapted to this sort of work.

“Originally of good stock, these boys’ families have probably occupied the same farm-land for several generations. The qualities that made their grandparents such fine workmen and craftsmen---for in the old days, the farmer did more for the house than he does today---are still latent in these youngsters. The boys usually start in knowing nothing about the work, but gradually and surely they develop a real appreciation for their tasks. It may take several months, but there always comes a day, when, rather shyly, as if ashamed of such a feeling in this machine age, they ask me to tell them what I think of the finish on a table or chair that they consider is better than any previous effort. Their sense of pride has been aroused, and from then on it is a game with them to see sho can produce the finest patina on a piece---and that requires plenty of muscle and long hours of rubbing. But they understand they are accomplishing something, even if they are a little vague as to what ‘something’ may be.

“It has been more than interesting to see how their viewpoint has changed from the feeling that a job was a certain number of hours’ hard work for just so much pay to the craftsmanship idea of doing their best for the pure love of doing.

“I have always contended that there is little difference between a hundred fifty year old antique and a fine modern reproduction,” Mrs. Roosevelt continues. “: Apart from beauty of line and texture of the surface, an antique should be cherished for the association it calls to mind. Unfortunately there are few of us who possess pieces that have been in the family for many years. And I get just as much thrill from seeing a piece gradually emerge to perfection in my own workshop as I do examining a priceless chest-on-chest in the metropolitan Museum. There is real enjoyment in watching the progress of a butterfly table, from the time the wood is chosen to the assembly, and seeing the grain of the wood imperceptibly appear through the varnish and finishing oils. And every lover of furniture knows the feeling of enjoyment when the fingers are passed over the table top with a fine patina that tells the expert, by the almost invisible ridges on the surface, that it was planed by hand.

“Really I have two interests in Val-kill: the actual pieces that are made there, and the development ---mental as well as material---of the workmen. I get a more personal sense of possession, I think, out of the cottage and its interior, which I saw assembled painstakingly, than the average person does with his own house. But everyone cannot be in the furniture business, or even reproduce old glass, china, pewter or rugs---though there would be many happier small communities if this were possible.

I am convinced of the worth of such an experiment not only as a business venture, but as a real aid to the people in the district.

“We are still in the frontier period in this country in spite of our complicated civilization. We have not yet settled down to the worship of certain customs and traditions as they have in Europe. Our taste is still fluctuating and we are not always sure whether we can trust it. This is one of the reasons why we buy antiques so willingly and are so hesitant about trusting our taste in modern furniture. We must begin to realize, however, that it is the good taste of the individual today which makes the valuable antique of the future.”

As to our fourth question---the cost---Mrs. Roosevelt has just told us of the infinite care and work that go into the making by hand of these Val-kill originals. This naturally makes the prices higher than on much of the present-day factory-built furniture. But the Val-kill furniture is so beautiful and so perfectly and lastingly constructed that the owning of even a single piece would bring joy that cannot be measured in money. As a wedding present-or an extra-special Christmas gift---what could be more gloriously welcome? There will be historic value too and memories of this exciting moment in America’s development that will cling to Val-kill furniture and go with it through all coming generations.

But Mrs. Roosevelt’s own point of view on the pleasure of all enduring things is so satisfying and so delightfully Rooseveltian that we must give it to you exactly as she phrases it:

“There is something fascinating in the idea of preserving not only our name, but some tradition of what manner of person we were, in the memories of our great-great-grandchildren a hundred years and more from now. Few of us can hope to do things noteworthy enough to be remembered long after our contemporaries are forgotten, but there is still one way left.

“If we acquire something so beautiful, in the best sense of the word, that it will be preserved for its own sake and so sturdy in its construction as to defy time, we may be sure that it will be handed down from generation to generation with some clinging tradition as to who we were and what we did.”