Furniture design for Chamer Möbelfabrik Schoyerer

It is thanks to the interest in documenting the company history of Chamer Möbelfabrik Schoyerer (Cham furniture factory Shoyerer) that around 100 of Franz Zell’s designs for furniture and interior design are in the collection at the Kreismuseum Walderbach in the district of Cham. These are drawings and watercolours of individual pieces of furniture and room ensembles in the style of Historicism, Art Nouveau and of "farmhouse parlours" and "farmhouse furniture" designed according to traditional models.

From 1898 to 1902, Zell designed furniture in a variety of historicist styles for Schoyerer’s furniture production workshop. In the "Deutscher Schreinerkalender" (German carpenter’s calendar) published by Zell from 1894 to 1898, he recommended himself "for every style" in advertisements and offered drawings for "bamboo, Japanese and Moorish furniture, for hunting rooms and farmhouses". "Bauernstil" (Farmhouse style), as Zell called his designs for panelled or painted parlours, completed the range of historicist forms that encompassed all styles. Alongside the reception of historical stylistic forms, the application of seemingly ahistorical forms of folk art took on equal importance. After the historical styles had been debunked, folk art was discovered as a style.

Zell’s designs for Schoyerer show his adeptness in all styles, he mastered the aesthetic canon. As a successful architect, Zell had complete interiors for his clients’ country houses made by Schoyerer from 1906 to 1915. Designs were made in the "modern" style, as Zell called Art Nouveau, at the same time as historicist ones.

From 1934 Zell was again responsible for Schoyerer’s series production, now exclusively farmhouse furniture. The huge success of the farmhouse furniture designed in the 1930s in the context of the promotion of the "folk" and farmers propagated by the National Socialists makes the further historical influence of the discourse on folk art clear.

Dr. Bärbel Kleindorfer-Marx