Stickley's Morris chair: the new one costs more than the 1905 original

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · September 12, 2026

A Gustav Stickley spindle Morris chair, model 369, made around 1905 and signed with the red decal, sold at Toomey in March 2023 for $4,032. Stickley still builds that chair. It is still called 369. The new one lists at $8,505.

What a Morris chair actually is

A Morris chair is a wooden armchair with a hinged back that reclines, held at each angle by a removable rod or peg dropped into notches behind the back posts. No springs, no mechanism, no lever. You lean forward, lift the rod, move it back a notch, and lean into the new angle. It is the ancestor of every recliner sold since, and Stickley's own catalog copy is happy to say so.

William Morris did not design it. The account that has survived credits a Sussex carpenter named Ephraim Colman with the adjustable-back prototype in the mid-1860s; Warington Taylor, the business manager of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, sketched it, and Philip Webb adapted it into a chair the firm could sell. Morris and Company put it on the market, and the customer did what customers do, which was to name the thing after the shop. The firm's version is a Victorian object, spindly and upholstered, and it looks almost nothing like what Americans picture.

What Americans picture is Gustav Stickley's version, which arrived some forty years later, weighed three times as much, and was built out of quartersawn white oak.

How Stickley came to build one

Gustav Stickley had been in the furniture business for fifteen years before he made anything anyone remembers. He and his brothers Albert and Charles started out in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania in 1883 and moved to Binghamton the following year. He set up on his own in 1898, in Eastwood, on the eastern edge of Syracuse.

Everything that matters happened in the six years after that. He traveled in Europe, came home converted to the English Arts and Crafts argument, and in 1901 dissolved his arrangement with the Tobey Furniture Company and renamed the operation United Crafts, a name meant to imply a workers' cooperative. In October of the same year he published the first issue of The Craftsman. In 1903 the firm became the Craftsman Workshops, and the word Craftsman became the brand.

The Morris chair belongs to the middle of that run. The collector literature puts model 369 in production from about 1905 to 1908, offered with either spindles or slats below the arm, and with an early sling seat later replaced by a drop-in cushion seat. Auction houses describe the same number as a drop-arm chair, a spindle chair and a bent-arm chair depending on which variant crossed the block, which is the first hint that Stickley's numbering is less precise than buyers assume.

Reading the shopmark, decade by decade

Gustav Stickley changed his mark often enough that the mark is usually the fastest way to date a piece. The motto inside it never changed: Als ik kan, Flemish, generally translated as as I can or to the best of my ability, set inside the outline of a joiner's compass. From October 1901 it was applied to essentially everything the shop produced.

Mark	Approximate years	What to look for
Early sticker	ca. 1900–1901	Predates the compass. Scarce, and rarely intact.
Red decal, compass and Als ik kan	ca. 1901–1903	The classic red decal. Compass outline with the motto inside.
Decal, compass with script signature in a box	ca. 1902–1904	Signature enclosed in a rectangle below the compass.
Decal, full name with looping G	ca. 1904–1907	The G in Gustav curls back on itself.
Decal, sharp-pointed G	ca. 1905–1912	Angular G, and the bar across the compass sits horizontally.
Eastwood paper label	ca. 1905–1907	Often carries a penciled production note.
Transition paper label	ca. 1907–1908	Short-lived bridge between label styles.
Brown-text paper label	ca. 1907–1912	Printed in brown rather than black.
Burned-in brand	ca. 1912–1916	Branded, not printed. Late Craftsman Workshops.
Late paper label	ca. 1912–1916	Meant to be used alongside the brand, not instead of it.

On Morris chairs the decal turns up in two places in the auction record: on a leg, and on the back rail. The Toomey 369 that made $4,032 carried the red decal on the back rail and, underneath, a partial paper label from the Craftsman Workshops — two marks from overlapping windows on one chair, which is normal rather than suspicious.

And the other Stickleys

Leopold and John George Stickley, working in Fayetteville, marked their work on a different schedule, and knowing theirs saves a lot of misattribution.

Mark	Years	What it says
Onondaga Shops	1904–1906	Oval brown paper label or rectangular decal, an S or the words The Onondaga Shops.
Red clamp, Handcraft	1906–1912	A woodworker's clamp in red with L. and J.G. STICKLEY HANDCRAFT. Family accounts say Gustav objected to how closely it echoed his own red compass.
Red and yellow rectangle	1912–1918	THE WORK OF L. AND J.G. STICKLEY. The same wording also appears branded.
Conjoined circular mark	1918 onward	Leopold combined his clamp with Gustav's compass, carrying both Handcraft and Craftsman, during the attempt to bring the brothers back together.

Reading a mark for a date is the same habit that dates a piece of Dansk teak to a decade, and it fails the same way: the mark tells you when the piece was made only if the mark belongs to the piece.

How to tell a real Gustav Stickley

Two rules first, because they cut against instinct. Absence of a mark does not mean it is not Stickley — decals sat on surfaces that got handled, and plenty wore away entirely. Presence of a mark does not mean it is — a decal is the single easiest thing on the chair to add later. Everything below is worth more than the label.

• Look for ray fleck on every show surface. Quartersawn white oak produces flat, silvery ribbons across the grain. Stickley used it on faces, sides and often the parts you would not see. A piece with figure on the front and plain flat-sawn oak everywhere else is the wrong kind of economy.
• Find the pins in the joints. Pinned mortise-and-tenon joinery is the structural signature. Look for small end-grain plugs where a rail meets a post. On the through-tenon designs, the tenon comes out the far side of the post and is wedged or pinned in the open.
• Check the color against the grain. The original finish was fumed — oak closed in a tent with ammonia, which reacts with tannin in the wood and darkens it from the inside. It follows the figure and varies with it. Sprayed stain sits on the surface and makes everything an even brown, which is what most refinishers reach for.
• Work the adjustment. The back should pivot on a fixed pin and hold at each notch with a loose rod. A back that adjusts by a metal ratchet, a friction slide or a lever is not a Morris chair in this sense, whatever the listing calls it.
• Know where marks hide. Paper labels survive in shadow far more often than decals survive in daylight, so check inside drawers, across cabinet backs, on undersides and under the seat rails. Partial labels are common and still useful. On chairs the red decal also turns up semi-visibly, on a leg or a back rail, so a mark you can see is not by itself a warning sign.
• Judge the decal against the wood around it. An original decal has aged inside the finish with the surface it sits on. A mark that is crisper, glossier or newer-looking than the wood immediately around it — or that turns up somewhere no catalog or auction record puts it — is the thing to walk away from. Blurred printing, uneven ink and misspellings are the cruder end of the same problem.
• Photograph the mark before you decide. Shoot it square, in daylight, and note exactly where on the piece it sat. It is the record you will want if you ever sell, and it is the fastest way to get a second opinion.

The look-alikes, including Stickley's own

There are four Stickley furniture companies in this story and only one of them is Gustav's. Then there is the modern company, which is the one that confuses people most, because everything it says about itself is true.

What it is	How it fools you	The tell
L. and J.G. Stickley, Fayetteville, 1902 onward	Genuine Stickley, genuine period, genuinely excellent, and the name on the decal is Stickley.	The red clamp, not the compass. Different model numbers — 412, 471, 497 — and a different market. Not a lesser chair; a different maker.
Stickley Brothers, Grand Rapids, trading as Quaint	Albert and John George again, same surname, same era, same style.	The word Quaint, and a Grand Rapids attribution. A third company entirely, and the Quaint line belongs to them rather than to Leopold and John George.
Charles Stickley, Binghamton	The fourth brother, and the least documented.	Scarcer marks, usually stenciled or stamped, and no compass.
Modern Stickley Mission Collection, 1989 to the present	Made by the company that owns the name, to the original drawings, in oak, with a shop mark based on the 1917 original burned into the wood.	It is signed and dated by the craftsperson who built it. A date on a Stickley mark is proof of newness. The model number reads 89-369 or 91-369, the prefix denoting the wood.
Limbert, Lifetime, Come-Packt and unmarked mission oak	Right period, right wood, right silhouette, often right quality.	Their own marks, where marks survive. Worth owning on merit, not worth Stickley money.

The fourth row deserves the detail. When Alfred and Aminy Audi brought the Mission Collection back in April 1989, they did it with the antiques market in the room: Stickley's own account of the decision points at a 1988 Christie's sale where a Gustav Stickley sideboard made $363,000. Alfred Audi and designer William DeBlaay worked from catalogs, records and borrowed originals to recreate more than thirty pieces. And then, deliberately, they built in differences so the new work could never be mistaken for the old: side-hung, center-guided drawers and blind dovetailed cross rails, construction Gustav never used.

That is the opposite of a forgery. It is a manufacturer taking the trouble to make its reproductions identifiable. The confusion in the secondhand market is not Stickley's doing — it comes from resellers who see an oak Morris chair with a burned-in Stickley mark, find an auction result for a 1905 chair with the same model number, and price accordingly. The two chairs are separated by eighty-four years and one signature line.

What Stickley Morris chairs sell for

These are published results from named auction houses on named dates, for lots whose marks are described in the catalog. Prices are as the houses published them; where a house reports a realized price it generally includes the buyer's premium, so treat these as what the buyer paid rather than what the hammer fell at.

Lot	Sale	Estimate	Realized
Gustav Stickley, spindle Morris chair, model 369, c. 1905. Red decal to back rail, partial Craftsman Workshops paper label beneath	Toomey, Mar 2023	$1,000–1,500	$4,032
Gustav Stickley, drop-arm Morris chair, model 369, 1905–1912. Red decal to leg	Rago, Sept 2020	$3,000–5,000	$3,750
Gustav Stickley, knock-down settle, model 210, c. 1912. Branded mark to lower side rail	Toomey, Mar 2024	$3,500–4,500	$6,550
L. and J.G. Stickley, paddle-arm Morris chair, model 412, c. 1910. Handcraft decal to outside back rail	Toomey, June 2023	$2,500–3,500	$5,040
L. and J.G. Stickley, flat-arm Morris chair, model 497, c. 1910. Handcraft decal to back stretcher	Toomey, Oct 2024	$2,000–2,500	$2,142

Read the fourth row against the first two. An L. and J.G. paddle-arm chair beat both Gustav 369s, and it did it on a Handcraft decal, which the market is supposed to value less. At this level of the market the form and the condition are doing more work than the surname. The Gustav premium is real, but it lives at the top of the range rather than the middle — on the rare early bow-arm chairs, on case pieces, on the material that makes headlines.

What the new one costs

Stickley currently lists the Spindle Morris Chair, model 89-369, at $8,505, discounted to $5,529, in oak or cherry, eight to twelve weeks from the factory. The company describes it as a reproduction of a Gustav Stickley design of about 1906.

So a buyer can pay $5,529 for a new chair built this year, or $4,032 for the chair it was copied from, signed with the red decal, at a specialist auction, in the same decade. Both of those are real numbers. Only one of them is an antique.

Why the finish is a quarter of the price

Fumed oak darkens with age and handling into something a refinisher cannot put back. Strip it and you have removed the part of the object that carries the century.

The collector consensus is less absolute than the purists suggest, and the number is worth knowing. A competent, appropriate refinish on a common form supports a deduction of roughly 25 percent. A rare form takes a smaller hit, because a collector may never get another chance at the shape. A sloppy refinish — visible scratch marks, a glossy modern topcoat, the wrong color entirely — takes considerably more. And a good second refinish that corrects a bad first one can actually raise the number, without ever reaching what an untouched surface would bring.

This is the same argument as original paint on a duck decoy, and the same instinct people get wrong in the same direction: the impulse to clean it up is almost always the expensive impulse. If a chair has an intact original finish, the correct amount of restoration is usually a wax and nothing else.

Upholstery is the exception. Nobody expects hundred-year-old leather, and replacing a shot seat with correct material does not damage value the way stripping does. Auction catalogs routinely note replacement leather without apology.

The chair that leans back

The thing that makes the Morris chair worth the attention is that it is honest about its own mechanism. The rod is right there. You can see how the chair works from six feet away, and you adjust it by picking up a piece of wood and moving it, which is the whole Arts and Crafts argument compressed into one gesture: nothing hidden, nothing that cannot be repaired by the person sitting in it.

Gustav Stickley built that chair for three years, went broke nine years later, and lost the name to his brothers. The company that carries his name now sells the same chair, under the same number, for more than a signed original brings at auction. Both facts are true at once, and the gap between them is where the collecting happens.

If you find one in oak with ray fleck in the arms, pins in the joints, a color that moves with the grain and a rod that still drops into its notches, look for the decal last. By then you will already know.