Shaker Style

    Shaker style offers the simplistic beauty often found in modern décor, while providing a bit more of a rustic look. Somewhat similar to country in style, Shaker homes stay far away from the sleek and sexy. Instead, they're an example of the beauty of restraint. Barren walls lined with a seemingly endless row of pegs, furniture lacking extra adornments and the absence of decorations all exemplify the Shakers appreciation of simplicity.
    In fact when you walk into a Shaker home, you almost feel as if you're walking into a college dorm at the beginning of the year ready for posters and pictures to adorn the walls and bring life to the room. But unlike college dorm rooms - at least my experience with dorm rooms - a Shaker home consists of beautiful craftsmanship and unbelievable planning. Those subtle details that you fail to notice when you first walk in, give the rooms life and energy in a much calmer and subtle way than most are used to. It's the type of simplicity that is often taken for granted and even worse, unnoticed.  
    While today, that simplicity is praised from the aesthetic standpoint, the Shaker's did not create it for that purpose. The Shaker style evolved from strong religious beliefs that guided the way they viewed life and worked day-to-day.
    "The Shakers were not using simplicity just for simplicity's sake," the Interpretation and Education Manager at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Susan Hughes, said. "It was a way of expressing, a way of worshipping. A chair is beautiful because it functions well, and so you pair away all of the decorative items and get back to the simplicity."
   Functions importance to the Shakers kept the Shakers from having a truly defined style. Each Shaker community across the United States built different styled homes to accommodate the climate of its region. The styles vary so drastically, that an untrained eye would find it hard to point out a Shaker home if they saw one.
    "Pleasant hill and the three communities around Cincinnati, Ohio are more reflective of architecture in the upper south," Hughes said. "It's a T-shaped architectural plan. That is very functional here in the south because we have many more hot days than we have cold days. So you have large windows, high ceilings, big arcs and transoms over the windows, and buildings here are sited so that the front of the buildings are to the south and that means that the large banks of windows are on the east and the west to bring through those cooling breezes.
    "When I was in Cantebury, New Hampshire, the new England communities have more cold days, than hot days. So most of their buildings are built on a rather compact foot print - usually square or rectilinear. The ceilings and the doorways are very short, and that's so they can conserve heat."
    In addition to planning for weather, the Shakers designed their homes to maximize space.
    "Staircases take up a lot of room in a building and I think they took a lot of care to make the most efficient use of that space," Hughes said. "The spiral staircase is a very efficient use of a tight space, and yet it's very beautifully done."
    In keeping with their penchant for function, the Shakers kept their homes extremely organized to keep community life running smoothly.
    "I guess if there were two key concepts that I would talk about with the Shakers, it would be union and order," Hughes said. "Union meaning everyone singing from the same line in the hymn book, and order meaning neatness. I think that comes back to their communalism. They're living a communal lifestyle. If you're living in a room with three to five people, you can't have your own stuff cluttered all over the place."
    The Shakers devotion to neatness is one of the hallmarks of Shaker style. When walking through a Shaker home, it is easy to see that there is an intended storage spot for each item. The Shaker's fervent organization was highly influenced by their leader, Ann Lee.
     "A lot of things are attributed to [Ann Lee], such as 'A place for everything,' and 'Everything in its place,'" Hughes said. "She did tell the believers to be clean, and that was one thing that was remarkable different for the Shakers than for their contemporaries in the 19th century. They kept their dooryards clean. They didn't thro their trash out the backdoor. Every commentary during the 19th century who wrote about the Shakers, talks about how clean and swept and neat and orderly everything was."
    Today, most people try to organize their home and make those homes more functional to establish a sense of peace and make their lives a little less stressful, but to the Shaker's organization and function were beauty. The Shakers found simplicity aesthetically pleasing, and of all ways to describe Shaker style, perhaps the best is plain. And that plain is a good plain - the type of plain that allows you see the way light moves on a wall undisturbed by decorative objects.