From its Victorian heyday to Mid-century Modern experimentation, wicker has continued to prove useful and beautiful across movements of design. Today, the wild and cultivated natural material provides an ideal solution to replacing less sustainable materials, yet in Europe the craft is barely clinging on, and it’s only thanks to a handful of pioneers and heritage design houses that the skills still remain.
The craft of woven basketry, later known as wicker, dates back to the Neolithic period. Early civilisations wove objects such as baskets, fish traps and shelters out of local, wild plants, be they bamboo, reeds or rattan, cane or willow. The oldest examples have been discovered in the tombs of ancient Egyptian pharaohs, depicted in frescoes, imprinted on pottery and described in the creation myths of Babylon, Mesopotamia and Dogon cultures.
From the 14th century, the word ‘wickerwork’ emerged from Scandinavian origins (the Middle Swedish viker meaning willow and vika to bend). The material’s durability and lightness meant it was ideal for transportation overseas on boats during the trade and colonisation of the following centuries. The abundantly growing rattan, a species of palm native to tropical and subtropical Asia, travelled from the Philippines to Europe and America, and was often used to stabilise cargo.
In the mid-17th century, entrepreneur Cyrus Wakefield began to utilise this ‘waste’ material to make furniture that was more affordable than upholstered timber alternatives. In 1897, he merged with Heywood Brothers & Company, which had invented a mechanical weaving process, forming Heywood–Wakefield, which became one of the best-known wicker furniture manufacturers. Meanwhile in Victorian Britain, Dryad’s cane pieces achieved similar popularity; its famous catalogue of styles featured everything from moses baskets to rocking chairs, hampers to tea wagons and newspaper racks to plant and cake stands.
The turn of the century experienced a moment of wicker revival with the Arts and Crafts movement, and then in the 1920s with the rise of café culture. In Prague and Vienna, the Rudnik Wickerwork Manufactory (active 1886–1965), one of the largest of the material’s manufacturers, reached its peak in the early 20th century with over 2,500 employees. In Paris, Maison Louis Drucker dominated the market for colourful cane rattan bistro chairs now synonymous with Paris – up to World War II, the house produced 80 per cent of rattan furniture on the French market and, after riding consecutive waves of decline, still operates today.
Meanwhile in the south of France, in Vallabrègues just north of Arles, Armand Boyer established his basket-making workshop in 1878 at the Hôtel Drujon. After the family business finally ceased in 1982, the 18th-century house became abandoned. In 2014, Benoît Rauzy and Anthony Watson moved in and, inspired by discovering its history, established Atelier Vime in 2016, a wicker design studio that was soon favoured by the likes of Pierre Yovanovitch, Kelly Wearstler and Beata Heuman.
It’s fairly safe to say that Atelier Vime can be credited with the craft’s current wave of revival. The duo’s new book, The World of Atelier Vime: A Renaissance of Wicker and Style (Flammarion, 2024), explores their historical and visual research into basketmaking in the local area using the endemic ‘vime’ or osier willow. It flourished from the 19th century, being adapted to local uses such as fishing and wine-growing, and then with the rise of the middle classes, a market developed for home comforts and trinkets. In 1911, the village of Vallabrègues had 320 basket-makers, 17 per cent (the majority) of its working population.
The arrival of plastics in the 1960s, however, caused the industry to suffer; increased importation from Asia in the next decade also saw prices being undercut. The craft was deemed ‘quaint’ and ‘old-fashioned’, attracting fewer apprentices. ‘There were fifteen thousand basket-makers working [in France] in the 1950s,’ reads the book, ‘while today there are only around a hundred; many of them do not have access to networks of designers or sales outlets, which results in them being cut off from the business world.’
Atelier Vime is shifting this image, and breathing life into the industry by replanting willow – no longer on the banks of the Rhône in Provence, but in Brittany, now a more suitable region due to climate change. Furthermore, the two men are hiring local artisans and designing objects richly informed by the history of wicker design. The Hôtel Drujon has become a symbol for this activity and a pilgrimage for design lovers. It has become a home, gallery, shop and studio, displaying their designs such as the emblematic ‘Medici’ vase, a reinterpretation of a 1940s Maison Boyer design, as well as their collection of wicker and basketry antiques, some left behind by the previous occupants such as a demijohn and a beehive.
In the UK, Soane Britain undertook similar craft activism in 2011, when Lulu Lytle saved Britain’s last wicker workshop from closing down, taking it on to preserve its specialist skill. Soane had been working with Angraves for eight years prior. It has over 60 wicker designs in its collection, many of them informed by Victorian style. Angraves absorbed the archive of Dryad when it closed in 1956, becoming the last workshop in Leicestershire, the historic centre of British rattan from the late 19th century. Soane’s most striking wicker designs include the ‘Venus’ chair and the ‘Ripple’ console, items that demonstrate the artistry of the material, its ability to achieve flowing, shapely and cocooning volumes.
Atelier Vime draws design inspiration from wicker’s mid-20th-century revival in France. The craft had proved useful during World War II in the absence of alternative materials, then postwar designers began to combine it with modern materials to fashion avant-garde and ergonomic forms. Highlights of the duo’s personal collection include Charlotte Perriand’s ‘Rio’ table, living-room furniture sets by Janine Abraham and Dirk-Jan Rol for Rougier (a leading Marais-based manufacturer led by Madame Piat) and Audoux–Minet’s rope-and-tubular-metal experiments.
Mid-century furniture marketplace Vinterior, originally founded in 2016, has seen ‘persistent and sustained sales’ of wicker on its platform, crediting this to the revival of bohemian, 1970s-style interiors. Seating is apparently the most popular section for rattan and wicker items, where 1950s pieces can be found from by Franco Albini and Franca Helg for Bonacina. That leading Italian manufacturer, established in 1899, celebrated its 135th anniversary in 2024 with a monograph titled Bonacina: The Beauty of Rattan (Rizzoli, 2024), which illustrates its ability to consistently reinvent itself, often with collaborations on editions by (for example) Gae Aulenti, Gio Ponti and Ico Parisi.
Today, other design houses have been embracing this trend for mid-century wickerwork, with a wave of rattan reissues. Gubi released the ‘Bohemian 72’ rattan furniture collection in 2022, based on the designs of Italian big name Gabriella Crespi in collaboration with her estate. Danish company Sika-Design, founded in 1942, which produces rattan pieces by Arne Jacobsen, released Nanna Ditzel’s 1960s ‘Chill’ and ‘Hanging Egg’ chairs last year, and this year her curvy ‘Rita’ chair.
What wickerwork needs now is a new jolt of daring experimentation. Witness the work of Tino Seubert, who has created a series of hybrid ‘Anodised Wicker’ objects (WoI Oct 2024), which juxtapose the industrial and the organic, inspired by Hans J. Wegner’s designs from the 1950s. Or French interior designer Valériane Lazard’s collection of roped, straw pillows made in India in the traditional technique of mooda rice packaging for Mumbai-based gallery Aequo. With its sustainable natural materials, let’s hope that this latest wicker wave only continues to gain strength.
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