I’ve fallen in love with the Windsor Chair.
Curves meet faceted planes. Light ash contrasts with dark cherry. And when the afternoon sunlight casts shadows through the spindles of the Windsor chair, the effect can be breathtaking. The flexibility of the spindles makes this one of the most comfortable wooden chairs ever made.
The Windsor chair first appeared in King George’s England almost 300 years ago, and the design made its way to the Colonies where it had its greatest success. The chair remains one of the most widely copied styles of seating, taking on new forms and becoming quintessentially American. It was a democratic chair, at home in the kitchen or the living room, in a farmhouse or in a courthouse, or even out on the lawn. The Windsor chair was lightweight, comfortable and relatively inexpensive and when compared to the furniture of that period, very quick to make.
As a matter of fact, George Washington himself fancied Windsor chairs, with a recorded 27 of them at his Mount Vernon Home. Thomas Jefferson is said to have written a draft of the Declaration of Independence while seated in a Windsor and when it was signed in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on July 4 1776, the Assembly sat in Windsors. Washington’s officers sat in them at Fraunces Tavern in New York City to listen to his farewell speech, and in more recent history Henry Francis DuPont, the founder of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, had 250 Windsor chairs in his collection.
On my recent trip to Mid-Coast Maine, I visited Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers, designers and builders of some of the most beautiful Windsor chairs in the United States. Maine’s most famous furnituremaker, Thomas Moser gave up a Bates College professorship to start building furniture. Inspired by the Colonial and Shaker furniture styles and strongly influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement and Asian design, Moser combines craft, creativity, materials and design to create a chair that is executed by hand, built to last and restores the relationship between man and the decorative arts.
Paired with a traditional wooden table or a more contemporary glass piece, I look forward to using the Windsor more frequently and bought an armless Thos. Moser chair to use at my desk. I’m even sitting in it as I write. Oh, is this comfortable!!
