Furniture

Chairs

My chosen medium for exploring design ideas has been chairs, plastic ones to start with. An early interest in ecology took me to wood and, prompted by my good friend Richard La Trobe-Bateman, fell on steam-bending ash. It ticked all the eco boxes and has some remarkable properties, steam bending seasons the wood at the same time too.

With chairs we have body contact - they are more like a pair of boots than any other piece of furniture. They need a bit of flex to tempt your posture, making it comfortable that way. Comfort and good posture are a primary requirement. I love efficient structures and chairs offer a great medium for this. I go for light and strong ones where the flexure greatly increases their strength. They make you feel quite different from heavy, rigid ones.

Making chairs is a great help in designing them; it tells you how the material wants to be used. To avoid things that are a pain to make and avoid complexity.

C12 HOME OFFICE CHAIR

With more home working and leisure pursuits online, we spend more time in a chair in front of a screen than anywhere else except maybe our beds.

This prompted a complete redesign of a successful family of chairs with new moulds throughout, new pivoting mechanisms for both seat and back, new fabric range, upholstery filling, as well as larger castors for better mobility and more refined shape.

It is designed to be your chair, beautiful to look at, compact to suit a domestic environment, light and exceptionally comfortable with your posture very much in mind.

It encourages sitting actively. Sitting forward with your feet under the chair keeps your back straight and to stretch backwards to massage the lumber, and all positions in between. Space for your feet under the chair is important for its mobility and makes getting out of the chair easier.

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FURNITURE ARCHIVE

O RANGE

O range marks both a dramatic advance in construction and has refreshing, edgy good looks. Its most obvious feature is the tubular rivets, not just a pretty detail, they are many times stronger than conventional timber jointing and are particularly well suited to steam bending and the flexible structures that make the designs so strong and comfortable.

Less obvious is the wood’s subtle texture. By taking a radical look at the latest sawing technology, the most energy-intensive, noisy, dusty and boring bits of the making process have been removed, saving about 70% on energy and retaining the rewards of craftsmanship.

O range builds on over 30 years experience of sustainable design. It takes the environmental and structural benefits of steam bent ash and removes the limitations of conventional woodwork. Remarkably, ash, amongst the toughest of woods, is strongest when fast grown and absorbs more atmospheric carbon than any other trees.

ACHAIR

TRANNON RANGE

I started Trannon in 1979 in a closed school in Mid Wales where it stayed for 10 years. The language of the Trannon range happened in this period, C1, C2, C3, etc and the TR tables. We also did commissioned work including gallery seating at The Museum of Wales.

I teamed up with two of my ex-students from Hooke Park, Richard Foyle and Roy Tam. As craft-based workshops go, we were very successful and didn’t compromise our core principles. The range increased largely through specific projects. As well as the private customers, we sold to corporate and public sector specifiers.

C2 DIRECTOR'S CHAIR

C3 STACKING CHAIR

C10 SPRINGBACK CHAIR

C1 RATTAN RECLINER AND STOOL

C6 CAPTAIN'S CHAIR

HIGH WORK CHAIR

CONTOUR CHAIR

I designed the Contour Chair in my final year at the RCA, but the technique was developed the previous year for an exhibition in collaboration with ICI plastics division.

It won me the RCA silver medal and shortly afterwards was selected for a V&A Modern Chairs exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970. Two of them were bought for the V&A’s permanent collection.

Tables

Tables should have legs that don’t get in the way and should be rock solid. Solid hardwood table tops give pleasure over generations. Glass tops show off our dramatic structures and occupy very little visual space.

This is a small sample of table designs, if you have specific requirements we can meet them. Please get in touch to discuss.