Vintage Hexagonal Slatted Wood Basket with Rope Beckets, c. 1920–1955

The Piece

A small six-sided basket built out of thin wooden laths, silvered grey by weather, with twisted rope loops at the rim.

The walls are courses of flat sawn laths laid horizontally with an open gap between each one, five deep, carried on a vertical post at every one of the six corners. Nothing is glued and nothing is woven — every joint is pinned with a small U-shaped wire staple driven across the lath into the post beneath.

The floor is a separate lattice of laths running edge to edge, and under it, across the outside, run two heavier battens that stand the basket clear of whatever it is set on.

The rim is where the work shows. Driven into the top course at intervals are wire rings, each one bent by hand from a single length of wire — a loop turned over and both tails driven down into the wood, one of them folded flat against the surface. Through several of them are tied lengths of twisted natural-fibre twine, pale tan, frayed open at the ends.

The outside is bleached to a hard silver-grey with the grain standing proud; the inside is browner and softer in colour, and the laths there are darker and less eroded.

History & Provenance

Everything about the way this is put together says working gear rather than housewares, and the fastenings are the reason.

There is no joinery in it at all — no nails, no screws, no glue, no weaving. Every lath is held by a wire staple driven across it. That is how cheap, repairable, expendable equipment gets built: fast to make, fast to mend, and no great loss when the sea takes one.

The rim rings are the same argument made more plainly. They are not screw eyes out of a hardware drawer. Each is bent from a single piece of wire, looped, and driven home by hand, and they sit at irregular intervals rather than a measured pattern. Somebody made them at a bench, on the spot, for this basket.

What is tied through them is a becket — a rope loop fitted to an object so it can be carried, hung, lashed down or hauled. Beckets are marine fittings, and they are what turn a box into gear.

Slatted hexagonal containers of this construction belong to fishing and shellfish work, where an open lath basket does a job a solid one cannot: water and grit run straight out of it, it dries instead of souring, and it can be dunked, drained and stacked wet. What this particular basket held is not recorded on it, and it is not large enough to be a lobster pot, so it is offered as what it can be shown to be rather than given a job it cannot prove.

The cordage is what dates it. The twine is natural fibre — it is fuzzy along its length where individual fibres have broken and lifted, it frays open into a soft brush at the ends, and its twist is uneven. Synthetic rope does none of that; it stays slick, holds its lay, and melts rather than fuzzes. Natural-fibre line was displaced from working fishing gear by nylon and polypropylene through the 1950s and 1960s, and gear still rigged with hemp or sisal was rigged before that change.

The staple-and-lath construction sets the other end: wire staples in this use belong to the machine age rather than before it. On that evidence it is offered as c. 1920–1955, unattributed. There is no stamp, brand, paint, label or name anywhere on it; a port mark or a burned-in initial would narrow it, and there is none.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a texture object, and there is almost nothing that does what it does.

Silvered, fibrous, open-slatted wood catches light along every edge and throws a grid of small shadows through itself. On a shelf of smooth ceramics and polished wood it is the thing your eye stops on, and it costs a fraction of what a piece of sculpture would to do the same job.

The hexagon is the other half of it. Round baskets and square boxes are everywhere; a six-sided one reads as deliberate and slightly odd, and it looks different from every side as you walk past it.

It is a genuinely useful shape too. At eight inches across it takes keys and post in an entry, garlic and shallots on a counter, seed packets and twine on a potting bench, remotes on a coffee table, or a small potted plant dropped in inside its own cachepot.

The palette could not be easier. Grey, silver and pale tan, with a little rust. It works against white plaster, painted board, dark walls, brick and stone, and it belongs with linen, stoneware, iron and old wood.

And it carries a real story without shouting about it. Hand-bent wire rings, rope beckets, staple-pinned laths, bleached by years of weather: this is equipment, not decoration, and the difference is visible from across a room. In a coastal house, a cabin, a workshop or a kitchen it earns its place by being the only honest thing on the shelf.

A note on care, and the first point is the important one. Do not carry it by the rope. The twine is old, frayed and broken in places, and it is there as evidence rather than as a handle. Lift it with both hands underneath.

Do not wash it and do not oil it. Weathered wood of this kind takes up water and stays damp inside the laths, and oil will turn the silver grey to a blotchy brown and take the whole character out of it. Dust it with a dry brush.

Keep it indoors and dry. It has already had its outdoor life; another wet winter would start taking laths off it.

If you use it to hold a plant, set the pot in a saucer or a liner first. Standing water in the floor lattice is the one thing that would undo it.