The Case for a Real Coat Rack in the Foyer
Bentwood-revival, considered. The small dignity of a coat that is hung rather than draped, and what it implies about the rest of the house.
There is a particular type of foyer that announces, before you have walked through it, that the house behind it has thought carefully about itself. It contains a real coat rack. Not an over-the-door hook, not a row of pegs hammered into a piece of reclaimed barnwood, not a Wallniture rail from a shipping carton. A real coat rack: bentwood, four to six arms, oiled finish, weighty enough that it does not topple under a winter overcoat and umbrella. There are not many of these in American homes, and where they exist, the rest of the house is usually worth the visit. ¹
The bentwood form is Thonet's, and most coat racks of any quality being made today are revivals or near-revivals of the Thonet No. 1 or No. 1bis stand. The technique is steam-bending solid beech under tension into a series of loops and curves that, when assembled, produce the four-armed silhouette familiar from any prewar European hotel. There are two ways to make a bentwood rack: properly, with steam-bent beech and brass collars, in which case it will outlast its owner; and improperly, with laminated beech veneer over a shaped pine core, in which case it will look correct in the showroom and will fail at the joints within five years. The first method requires a workshop. The second can be done in any furniture factory. The market is, predictably, full of the second.
The way to tell, before you have bought, is to ask. A real bentwood rack is sold with a description that mentions steam-bent solid beech. A near-rack is sold with a description that mentions 'beechwood frame' without further qualification. The price is not always reliable - I have seen near-racks priced at three hundred dollars and real racks at one-eighty - but the description nearly always is. If the listing copy is vague about how the bend was achieved, the bend was not achieved properly.
A coat slung over the back of a dining-room chair is not a hung coat. It is a coat in transit.
Why bother with this? Because the alternative, in most American foyers, is a Wallniture rail or, worse, the back of a dining-room chair. A coat slung over the back of a dining-room chair is not a hung coat. It is a coat in transit. It signals, however faintly, that the house has not made up its mind whether it intends to receive guests, which is a meaningful signal. A coat hung on a real rack is a hung coat. It signals that the house has decided on its terms. ²
The other alternative, the wall-mounted hook bar, has its place. In a small entry where a freestanding rack would intrude on circulation - a New York apartment foyer, a London terrace's narrow passage - a row of brass hooks on a hardwood backplate is the right answer, provided the backplate is heavy and the hooks are solid brass and the spacing is generous enough that two coats can hang without crushing each other. The mistake most often made with the wall-mounted approach is hooks that are too closely spaced. Six inches between hooks is a minimum; eight is better. A coat needs room to breathe.
But for any foyer with floor space - any foyer of three feet square or more - the freestanding rack is the right choice. It can be moved. It can be positioned at an angle relative to the door, which a wall hook cannot. It allows umbrellas to be parked at its base, which a wall hook does not. And it is, alone among foyer furnishings, the object that most clearly communicates a house's intentions toward visitors.
I have a mid-twentieth-century example, possibly a Polish factory's interpretation of the Thonet form, that I bought at an estate sale fifteen years ago for forty-five dollars. It has six arms, a solid central column, an integrated umbrella ring at the base, and a small worn medallion at the cap that I have never been able to identify. It has held, over the years, an extraordinary inventory of weather: down jackets, wool overcoats, a sodden umbrella every spring, a wet child's anorak more often than I would have predicted. It has not budged. The bend is true. The arms have not loosened. It is, of all the furniture in my house, possibly the piece I would replace last. ³
If you do not have one and are inclined to acquire one, the bentwood coat rack is the rare piece of furniture that benefits from being bought used. A solid beech rack from the 1950s or 60s, in good condition, will cost between seventy and two hundred dollars at any decent estate or auction house. The bend has had seventy years to settle. The finish has acquired the slight oxidation that no factory can produce. And the joints, if they have held this long, will hold another fifty years. New bentwood, even good new bentwood, will need to be lived with for a generation before it earns the same authority.
Recommended without reservation, on the condition that it is real bentwood, and on the further condition that it is placed in a foyer that intends to receive coats. A coat rack in a hallway with no coat traffic is just a tall obelisk; the rack needs the coats to make sense.