Cooper Hewitt says...
Located across the street from the New York Public Library, Joseph P. McHugh’s “Popular Shop” occupied not only a notable place in the New York City retail landscape, but also in the context of the Arts and Crafts style in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The firm of Joseph P. McHugh and Son was established around 1869, but by 1878 Joseph McHugh (1854–1916) had developed the “Popular Shop,” an offshoot of his father’s dry goods business.[1] After moving to his own location on 912 Sixth Avenue, the retail venture expanded from just selling window shades to offering customers furniture, wallpaper, and textiles as a large-scale interior design business. By 1884, the firm was entrenched at 9 West 42nd Street, which would be its only retail location.[2]
The retail store offered a variety of luxury items for clients to buy and decorate their homes that were both imported and inspired by the personal design vision of McHugh. Surviving advertisements speak to the wide range of products available, including Japanese grass cloths, colonial wool rugs, and “McHugh Singapore Lattice” fabric for sale, in addition to highly crafted furnishings and the occasional novelty item.[3] The designs were sourced internationally, with the shop acting as an authorized distributor for Liberty’s of London and also offering consumers products from the Wiener Werkstätte.[4] While some products were key inventory items each year, McHugh also played into the “popular” aspect of the shop’s name by keeping up with the latest interior design trends. Within the Popular Shop, visitors would find products that were either “artistically scattered” or were placed within constructed room environments that followed an Arts and Crafts vision of a unified interior space.[5]
Some of the most influential objects for sale within the shop were the Mission style furniture pieces. McHugh was well-known amongst his contemporaries for claiming to have originated the Mission style of furniture, which was designed by McHugh and Company employee Walter Dudley. These objects were first produced and sold in the store in the middle of the 1890s, and by 1906, advertisements identified the furniture type as being uniquely “McHugh Mission Style.”[6] After furniture manufacturer Gustav Stickley introduced his take on the style a few years after McHugh, the latter claimed that Stickley directly copied his designs.[7] Despite this competition, McHugh and Company was invited to showcase their line of furniture in the 1901 Pan American Exposition within the interior of the New York Building.[8] Through the distribution of decorative goods, McHugh ultimately changed countless interiors and brought the Arts and Crafts movement into the American domestic sphere. After the death of McHugh in 1916, the ownership of the firm passed down in the family.
1. “Some McHugh Statistics,”The Upholsterer and Interior Decorator, Volume 61 (1919):
75.
2. Anna Tobin D’Ambrosio, The Distinction of Being Different: Joseph P. McHugh and the
American Arts and Crafts Movement (Utica: Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, 1993): 11.
3. House and Garden: Volume Ten, July to December 1906 (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1906): 24.
4. Heather Hess, “The Wiener Werkstätte and the Reform Impulse,” in Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011): 123.
5. Tobin D’Ambrosio, The Distinction, 21.
6. House and Garden, 24.
7. The Distinction of Being Different, 24.
8. Dave Stubblefield and Vivian Yess Wadlin, “Mission Accomplished.” Arts and Crafts
Collector. https://www.artsandcraftscollector.com/collectors-article/joseph-p-mchugh-mission-accomplished/
