About En Casa
En Casa was founded by Ken Oakes in 2005 to introduce a new line of Mexican Rustic Furniture named “The En Casa Collection” in the traditional and non-traditional form of the Taos contemporary folk art movement. Ken Oakes designs and fabricates each original prototype piece of furniture. Then each piece is handcrafted in our workshop by our artisans using various traditional furniture joinery techniques such as mortise and tenon and dovetail joints and artistic effects depending upon the woods and mediums used for each project. Finally, each piece is stamped with the clients name and address, dated, and personally signed by Ken Oakes.

En Casa currently operates a full retail store at 361 Main Street in Niantic, CT along Connecticut’s beautiful shoreline just off RT-95 where each piece carried in the Website Gallery can be seen and viewed. We also carry a full line of Mexican and Central American home furnishings and artwork that include the following:

* Talavera Vases and planters
* Clay Pottery
* Aged Tin-Lamps/Mirrors/Candleholders/Cabinets
* Iron Artwork
* Garden Sculpture
* Zapotec Weavings
* Oaxacan carvings
* Wall hangings
* Musical Instruments
* Baskets

Currently we do not sell these items on our website however if there is an item you are looking for please feel free to contact us and we can try to order it for you.


History
New Mexican Furniture Through Time
The Blend of Native American, Hispano and Anglo-American traditions endows New Mexico with a unique cultural flavor that permeates all aspects of this southwestern society. The regions cultural flavor syncretism can be savored in the traditional cuisine and experienced when one interacts with everyday utilitarian objects such as furniture. Furniture’s functional importance often overshadows its aesthetic beauty. However, decoration and furnishings give insight into the social dynamics and aesthetic preferences of a community; the New Mexican furniture style is a reflection of the Native American, Hispano and Anglo-American sensibilities of this region. The strongest cultural influence visible in the New Mexican furniture style is that of Spain. Immigrant Spaniards brought the guild to the New World during the 16th century and established the first carpenter’s guild in Mexico City in 1568. At this time, woodworkers and furniture artists in the region now known as New Mexico appropriated many aspects of the Spanish guild system. One such adaptation was the customary practice of passing down trade secrets concerning the proportion, design, and structure of furniture from father to son in order to maintain a strong family tradition. This custom is still widely practiced today.

Given the need for furniture and the relative shortage of Spanish immigrants to this northern region during the early stages of colonial development in the 16th century, many Spanish friars passed on their woodworking skills and traditions to Pueblo Indians. The Pueblo Indians incorporated imagery that is found in the pottery and weavings, and other traditional arts of the Pueblo Indians into their furniture. Pueblo depiction of the heavens and the rain, gouge carvings of cornstalk motifs can be found on many of the pieces during this time.

The increasing number of Anglo-American settlers in the southwest during the first part of the 19th century also influenced New Mexican furniture design. Like other art revival movements that took place in the Appalachian region and among Native American peoples, New Mexico’s Spanish colonial revival movement was more about the economic needs of the depression era and the nostalgia and aesthetic tastes of Anglo-American visitors than about preserving a 400 year Hispanic tradition. Nevertheless, many innovative furniture forms developed out of this social and artistic phenomenon.

Although the Spaniards were responsible for introducing a particular combination of style, design and proportion into furniture making tradition of this desert region, New Mexican furniture today shows traces of varying historical influences. New Mexican furniture has developed into its own recognizable style as a result of the available native resources, and the unique Hispano, Native American, and Anglo-American amalgam of culture in this region.

Up until the mid-19th century, most New Mexican furniture was constructed out of native woods such as ponderosa pine and juniper, and basic hand-tools such as the saw, adz, chisel and auger were used in the building process. Increasing trade with Mexico coupled with the opening of the Sante Fe Trail in 1821 introduced new tools and techniques into the region. New Mexican furniture style during the colonial era featured mortise-and-tenon or dovetails joinery and was reinforced with hide glue. Most pieces were generally adorned with chip-carving geometric designs or low relief figural carvings. Spanish motifs that were appropriated into the New Mexican furniture style during the colonial era and many of these designs are still visible in the work of contemporary Hispanic New Mexican furniture artists today. Rampant lions denoting courage, pomegranates symbolic of fertility, rosettes reminiscent of Spain’s Moorish influence, and scalloped patterns, are only a handful of motifs, which are mimicked in Hispanic-style embroideries and weavings are the meandering pattern, bird-like forms and scallop shells associated with the pilgrimage to Santiago de Comostela.

Many of the adaptations developed to cope with the scarcity of resources in such a northern part of the Spanish colony are precisely what helped characterize the furniture of New Mexico. The modest locks and hinges on colonial New Mexican furniture for example, contrast with the dominant and heavy ironware seen in colonial Mexican furniture, and attest to the difficulty of acquiring large quantities of metal in this area. Similarly, the brittle nature of the native juniper and ponderosa pine woods prevented furniture makers in the north from appropriating the baroque carving style associated with the 18th century colonial furniture from Mexico and South America.

Furniture, like any other component of everyday life, is not stagnant and introduces yet another way to visually learn about the adaptive characteristics of society.

Revival of the Traditional Arts
What has come to be known as traditional Hispanic New Mexican art has evolved over a 300-year period. From 1694 until early 1900, the production of decorative and utilitarian arts was based on local demands and had a distinctive style. With the advent of the railroad in 1879, and the influx of Anglo writers, and artists, attitudes toward Hispanic arts began to change. By the 1920s, fewer santeros, weavers, furniture makers, blacksmiths and tinsmiths were continuing their skills, as commercial goods replaced handmade items. Recognizing this, the Sante Fe colony of Anglo writers and artists founded the Society for the Revival of Spanish Colonial Arts, which was later, renamed the Spanish Colonial Arts Society. This group represented the first efforts of non-Hispanics to promote Colonial art although many notable collectors had already amassed sizable collections of traditional Hispanic art. Led by curiosity and an interest in preservation, the artist colonies in Taos and Sante Fe focused on small Hispanic villages, launching Hispanic artists into tourist/collector-oriented market.

Between 1935 and 1952, in spite of Anglo patronage and enthusiasm, traditional Hispanic crafts were not deemed as “collectible” as American Indian arts and crafts. Many functions of the Society were assumed by federally-funded arts projects and vocational training programs under the New Deal of the 1940s. The Spanish Colonial Arts Society was revitalized in 1951 and with that came a rebirth of interest in artistry of Hispanic New Mexicans. By 1971, Spanish Market was established as an annual event on Sante Fe’s Plaza during the last full weekend of July, and in 1989, the first annual Winter Spanish Market was successfully introduced. July 1989 marked a significant event for New Mexican Hispanic arts: the opening of the Hispanic Heritage Wing of the Museum of International Folk Art in Sante Fe.

While the majority of the work produced in the early years of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society conformed exactly to historic pieces, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw Hispanic and non-Hispanic artists reinterpreting the traditional in non-traditional ways, as well as promoting traditional art forms. A cultural renaissance has let to an explosion of Hispanic arts in both traditional and non-traditional formats.

In the 1980s this renaissance has led to a new style of Spanish Colonial furniture and art often called Southwest Style, Sante Fe, Salsa Style, Mexican Country, Rustic, Taos and Neo-New Mexico Style. In the mid 1980s Taos and Sante Fe became centers of burgeoning contemporary folk art movement. In its regional form, artists and craftsmen began producing brightly painted furniture and other woodworks that incorporated whimsical variations of traditional northern New Mexico icons and design motifs. Rattlesnakes, coyotes, chickens, donkeys, pigs, lizards, toads, and traditional American Indian symbols proliferated. Before long a “look” was created that today has become part of mainstream America.