EVERYONE CAN—AND GENERALLY DOES—HAVE THEIR OWN IDEA of Adirondack style, making it a knotty concept to nail down. The form has branched into ever-evolving offshoots, but there’s a common origin, a beau ideal that was conceived in the heady days of robber-baron excess. If you close your eyes, you can probably conjure it—satiny wood, coarse bark, tangled sticks, river-smoothed stones. And some very dead animals.
Where did the building blocks of our signature style come from? Like most everything Adirondack, they grew from necessity and backwoods ingenuity.
In the very beginning, before the 1870s or so, rustic was literally rustic: simple, utilitarian, rough. Craig Gilborn, former director of the Adirondack Museum (now Adirondack Experience) and father of its annual Rustic Furniture Fair, called the earliest examples “ramshackle rustic.” These…
