I will be leading a Small Group Discussion at the upcoming 39th Annual Arts & Crafts Conference on Recognizing Authentic Arts & Craft Joinery. If you're attending, and would like to attend this discussion, it's scheduled for Sunday, February 22, 2026 in the Roosevelt Room "L" located in the Vanderbilt Wing. This post will serve as an aid to that conversation. The group's discussion will center around five traditional Arts & Crafts furniture joints:

• Dovetail joints
• Through tenons
• Solid-wood leg construction
• Keyed (i.e. wedged) Mortise & Tenons
• Housed Tenons

The fundamental keys to recognizing authentic (often referred to as hand-made, or hand-cut) joinery is to look for:

1. Small inconsistencies in the joint. 
2. Evidence of hand work. 
3. How the wood's grain runs through the joint.

So, what does that mean?

Small inconsistencies in joinery

In real hand-cut joinery, those “small inconsistencies” show up as tiny shifts in width, angle, and alignment from one piece to the next, even though the overall fit is tight and clearly deliberate. Individual parts aren’t perfect clones: shoulders might undulate just a bit under raking light, the outline of a tenon or “tongue” might taper a hair more on one side than the other, and matching details across a piece feel like they’re echoing a pattern rather than repeating with machine-like precision. Corners and margins feel alive under your fingertip: edges are clean but not razor‑perfect, edges soften a bit at the ends, and the lines where parts meet sometimes climb or dip by a fraction instead of running dead straight. Taken together, all those tiny quirks read as one skilled person working by eye and hand, not a cutter mindlessly tracing a template.

If you cut the same joints by machine, you’d expect almost perfect repetition. Each dovetail, pin, and shoulder would match its neighbor in width and length to a very tight tolerance, and the spacing would march around the piece with almost stamped regularity. The meeting lines would look laser‑straight and identical from joint to joint, corners would often share the same tiny radius or crispness that reflects the shape of the machine cutting tool used, and any minor variations you see would be more about later wear or damage than how the joint was made.


Note the subtle difference in dovetail size and angles. Zoom in to see scribe lines that indicate handwork.

See the scribe lines at the base of the tails.

Evidence of hand work

Evidence of hand work usually shows up on the less visible faces of parts: inside edges, undersides, and the cheeks or shoulders where joints come together. Those surfaces often have a subtle, uneven texture—very shallow ripples from a plane, little facets from a chisel or knife, or hand‑sawn scratches that don’t line up in perfect parallel. Edges tend to be crisp where the maker wanted them sharp, but they soften unpredictably where a hand went over them a few extra times or where the tool lifted out of the cut. Around tight corners and inside recesses, you’ll often see small, honest clean‑ups instead of one perfectly blended sweep: a tiny change of angle, a shallow dubbed spot, or a faint step where two tool passes met. It still reads as deliberate and competent; what’s missing is that perfectly uniform, “processed” look you get when every surface has been sanded or machined to the same exact texture.

If the same work were done mechanically, almost everything would point to uniformity and repeatability. Hidden faces would usually be either very smooth in a consistent way (from a planer or wide‑belt sander) or show machine marks that are dead‑regular in spacing and depth. Edges and corners would share the same small radius or sharpness everywhere the same cutter was used, and the way cuts run into and out of recesses would follow the fixed geometry of jigs and bits, not the slightly varied strokes of a hand tool. Any surface character would feel patterned instead of personal, and tool marks—if you can see them at all—would show up as identical signatures repeated from joint to joint, not the varied traces of one person fitting each piece.

While not an Arts & Crafts furniture example, this drawer accurately shows an example of what hand plane work would look like.

The back of this panel shows evidence of hand plane work used to narrow the panel’s edge so it will fit into the doors rails & styles.

See the circular saw marks which are evidence of circular, or round, power saw blade.

Note the vertical lines in the wood which indicate the board was cut with a bandsaw.

How the wood grain is running

Grain behavior through a joint is a dead giveaway for whether you’re looking at solid wood or veneer. In a solid, traditionally joined Arts & Crafts drawer, for example, the side is usually one continuous board: the long grain runs straight down the length of the drawer side, and at the corner you see the end grain of the front meeting the long grain of the side in a dovetail or locking joint. The growth rings and figure on neighboring faces “wrap” around a leg or rail in a way that makes sense, changing direction at the corner the way a real board would, instead of repeating like a printed pattern or suddenly turning into a different species at a glue line. On a good through tenon, the exposed tenon end grain matches the board it came from in both species and ring pattern, just rotated; the grain in the leg carries on cleanly past the mortise, so the tenon reads like a tongue passing through solid stock, not like a little cap stuck on the front. When the grain or figure suddenly breaks at the edge of a joint or looks like a picture that’s been wrapped around a corner, you’re usually looking at veneer or applied “faker” blocks, not honest, integral structure.


Note the growth rings on the board end, and the ray flecks (also on the board end) and how the flow to the board’s face.

Note the end-grain pattern on the through tenon, and the straight grain on one face of the leg, and the subtle ray flecks on the other leg face.

Let’s look at some specific examples:


Dovetail joints


To evaluate dovetails, particularly drawer dovetails, pull the drawer out and inspect both the side/front corner and the inside corner. Key visual cues of hand-cut dovetails:

• Uneven spacing and proportions. Pins and tails are not perfectly identical; pins are often much narrower than tails, and spacing will vary slightly from one to the next.

• Slightly irregular baselines. You may see faint scribe or gauge lines parallel to the drawer front, saw overcuts just past the baseline, or tiny chisel bruises in the corners where the waste was chopped by hand.

• Non “template” geometry. Hand-cut tails and pins rarely repeat exactly from one corner to another; machine-cut dovetails, by contrast, are mechanically regular, with all pins and tails the same width and evenly spaced like a router jig pattern.

When in doubt, compare all four corners of a drawer. If every corner looks numerically identical and “perfect” under raking light, you are almost certainly looking at machine work, not hand work.




Notice the inconsistent sized tails and layout lines.

Another example of inconsistent sized tails and layout lines.

Through Tenons

Through-tenons in Arts & Crafts furniture are structural first, decorative second; the end grain you see should belong to a true tenon, not a glued-on “cap.” Indicators of a genuine through-tenon:

• Continuous grain and logical layout. The tenon’s end grain should line up logically with the rail or stretcher it comes from, and the shoulder line (where the piece meets the leg) should be crisp and clean.

• Mechanical locking features. Many legitimate Stickley and related pieces use pinned or keyed through-tenons—round or square pegs driven through, or a wedge key passing through a slot in the tenon—where the pin/key clearly passes into the tenon, not just a shallow surface plug.

• Thickness and depth consistent with scale. A real structural tenon has enough “meat” to make sense for the span and load of the rail; faux tenons are often suspiciously thin, shallow, or randomly placed where a real joint would be structurally awkward.

If you see a “tenon” surrounded by a fine glue line on all four edges, with no visible shoulder transition and no sign of compression around any peg hole, it is likely an applied block rather than a real through-tenon.

Note the inconsistent spacing around the through tenons, and the layout lines.

The key to recognizing an authentic Keyed through tenon joint is to examine the grain on the key. The key can be either vertically or horizontally aligned.

Note the consistent gain lines of the wood throughout.

Solid Leg Construction

Stickley’s mission legs are visually simple but structurally sophisticated; the goal was quartersawn figure on all four faces and robust mortise-and-tenon joinery. Many “Stickley-style” legs today are actually veneer or solid posts lacking that four-sided quartersawn look. Indicators of a true or faithful Stickley-style leg:

• Quartersawn figure on all faces. On original and correctly made Stickley-style legs, you will see ray flecked grain on each of the four leg faces, not just on two opposing sides. This was achieved either by veneering flatsawn cores or by laminating four quartersawn boards with trapezoidal profiles to form a hollow but visually solid leg.

• Clean, nearly invisible corner joints. On laminated legs, the four boards are jointed with 45°-ish bevels, often with a small tooth-and-notch profile to align the pieces; seams fall right at the corners and are tight enough that you see a crisp corner rather than a clear butt joint.

• Structural joinery into the leg, not face-nailed blocks. Rails and stretchers typically enter the leg with substantial mortise-and-tenon joints, often pinned; there should be no reliance on small metal brackets or screws as the primary structural element.

When evaluating a leg from underneath, look for veneer thickness and substrate. A thin veneer turning the corner with a uniform glue line is veneer work, whereas four distinct, solid boards meeting in clean miters or trapezoidal seams indicates the laminated solid Stickley-style construction.

Notice the leg construction of 4 separate pieces of wood, which allows the legs to display quarter-sawn white oak ray flecks on all four faces of the leg.

Note that the tenoned slat extends into the rail.

Housed Tenons

Used almost exclusively in Greene & Greene furniture or contemporary artist furniture, housed tenons are a variant of mortise-and-tenon where the rail or slat actually sits in a shallow “housing” or recess in the leg, hiding the joint line while still using a true tenon inside. This was used extensively on chairs, tables, and casework.


Tell-tales of a housed tenon in Greene & Greene–style work:

• Recessed shoulder line. Instead of the rail simply butting against the leg with a visible hairline, the leg often has a shallow, stepped recess so the rail’s face sits slightly proud or slightly inboard within that pocket, visually thickening the joint and disguising movement.

• No open gap at leg–rail junction with age. The practical reason for the housed joint is that seasonal shrinkage occurs within the housing; even on older pieces, you won’t see a daylight gap appear between rail and leg edge in the way you might with a simple shouldered mortise-and-tenon.

• Reinforcing pins and ebony plugs. Greene & Greene often combine housed tenons with through-pins that are then capped by slightly proud, eased-edge ebony plugs; the plug pattern corresponds to the hidden tenon, and its alignment will be consistent from joint to joint on original work.

Look closely under strong side light: the subtle step or recess around the rail is the physical clue, while the pin/plug pattern is the stylistic fingerprint of the Greene brothers design, and the Hall brothers production and assembly.


Notice the 1/8” recessed “housing” for a sideboard rail.

Note the sharpie line on the rail, that shows how deep the housed rail will fit into the leg house/mortise.

Whether it be Stickley brothers, Charles Rohlfs, Frank Lloyd Wright or even Greene & Greene, this post represents a good starting point for recognizing authentic joinery in American Arts & Crafts furniture. However, there are many nuances, beyond the reach of this post to consider. Because many American manufacturers of Arts & Crafts furniture did not feature hand-cut joinery, which was simply not possible when trying to keep up with the demand, and price-point customers were willing to pay American Arts & Crafts furniture. See my post on “Accurate Arts & Crafts Drawers” for a good example of how American manufacturers dealt with these challenges.