SOMETHING NEW

Brooklyn mid-century style range at Littlewoods

Not one to do a post on budget modern furniture but seeing this on http://www.retrotogo.com/

I had to post their post a similar post, I do think with their nod to mid-century design and clean danish almost like lines and fine details, i do think they will be gems of the future, although i cannot vouch for their quality.

Prices range from £84 for a lamp table up to £211 for a sideboard.

See the range

http://www.littlewoods.com/rf/s.do?Ntx=mode+matchallpartial&Nu=this_product&Np=1&Nty=1&Ntk=generic_search&Ntt=brooklyn

RIP - LUCIENNE DAY - THE BEST IN BRITISH DESIGN - January 5, 1917 / January 30, 2010

It is with sadness that I have just heard another great designer and Icon has recently passed away. One cannot think of British design without thinking of the Days. They were ground breaking, trend setting before the word was even invented and inspirational to many designers.

Lucienne Day was the wife of furniture designer Robin Day. The Days, considered to be Britain's most celebrated designer couple of the post-war era, were married from 1942. They are often compared to their American counterparts, Charles and Ray Eames.

The development of their styles can be traced in Lesley Jackson's book Robin and Lucienne Day, published in 2001. An exhibition of Lucienne Day's textiles and Robin Day's furniture, 'Robin and Lucienne Day: Design and the Modern Interior', will be held in Spring 2011 at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester - the city where the Days retired.

Here is a clip from the orbiturary by the Guardian please click on the link below for the full article.

Lucienne Day, who has died aged 93, was the foremost British textile designer of her period. Day's furnishing fabrics, of which the most famous was the Festival of Britain abstract pattern Calyx, hung in every "contemporary" living room in Britain. The reality of "art for the people", dreamed about by the Victorian William Morris, was finally achieved by a female designer in the middle of the 20th century.

Lucienne drew on the English tradition of patterns based on plant forms that went back as far as Morris. She took motifs drawn from nature – flowers, grasses, shoots, the intricate patterns of the landscape – and transformed them into something absolutely new. Part of their success was the implied message of regrowth and optimism for a Britain only just recovering from war.

She was also deeply influenced by European abstract painting. Her textiles speak the visual language of Kandinsky, Miró and Klee. It pleased her to think that people who could not afford to buy a painting for their living room could at least own a pair of abstract patterned curtains. Many of Day's printed fabrics were made in long production runs, which kept the price affordable. She made the link between mass production and fine art.

Born Désirée Lucienne Conradi, she was brought up in the comfortable south London suburbs. Her mother was English and her father Belgian. She went to a convent school and always kept a distinctly continental reticence and chic. From a very early age she was focused on designing, and studied at Croydon School of Art and then, from 1937 to 1940, at the Royal College of Art. It was there, in her final year, that she first met the furniture designer Robin Day.

Decades later they were still, very touchingly, describing that meeting as the start of a true romance. Perhaps the secret lay in Lucienne's professional autonomy. Their partnership was often, wrongly, compared to that of their contemporary American designers Charles and Ray Eames. Ray Eames's professional work was merged with, and in some degree subsidiary to, her husband's, whereas Lucienne's career was always distinct.

Lucienne set out on her career at a period when design was only just beginning to emerge as a recognisable profession. In that sense she was a pioneer. Her first freelance designs were for dress fabrics. But she quickly moved into the more democratic area of furnishing fabrics, broadening her scope to include carpets, wallpapers and table linens. Her work formed part of what she later described as a "tremendous surge of vitality" after the war. Her success was part and parcel of the Homes for the People movement, the Britain Can Make It exhibition, and the proselytising spirit of the Council of Industrial Design.

Calyx, the first design that brought her real fame, was exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951. A large expanse of it hung in the Homes and Gardens pavilion, in the "contemporary" dining room designed by Robin. The pattern of free-floating cusps or mushroom caps, Lucienne's fresh interpretation of the geometry of nature, was screen-printed on linen. The original colouring – so redolent of the festival – was sharp yellow, orange, black and white on an olive ground.
Lucienne Day fabric Calyx, the fabric design that brought her fame

Heal's Fabrics were the manufacturers of Calyx. So unconfident were they of its success that they paid only half of the £20 that Lucienne had wanted to charge for the design. They had the decency to pay her the other £10 later, once the pattern had won a gold medal at the Milan Triennale and the international design award of the American Institute of Decorators. Day was the first British designer ever to have won this very influential American award.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/03/lucienne-day-obituary

THINGS IN MY HOME - DUALIT TOASTER

Continuing with items in my home am working through the kitchen at the moment and if there ever was a Best of British it has to be the Dualit toaster. Dualit’s classic toasters are a design icon. Built for commercial use, they have since won numerous consumer accolades and come in a range of variants, sizes and colours. From the Vario to the enhanced NewGen and the more specialised Sandwich, Combi and Bun toasters, they all share the same timeless styling, reliability and Dualit design features. Engineered to produce the best toast in the world, Dualit toasters are still built by hand in the UK, with the assembler’s stamp on every base plate. So whether you’re a toast aficionado at home, or a professional caterer needing to produce 80 toasted sandwiches an hour, we can guarantee that one of our Dualit toasters will be perfect for you.

It trully does make the perfect toast and its design is simply iconic.

BEST OF BRITISH DESIGN - WILLIAM PLUNKETT

I phoned Mr Plunkett up once to ask if he ever had designed a coffee table that was the opposite to his coulsden table and ended up talking to him for an hour, he was a lovely man and very interesting. He no longer makes furniture and now only does sculptures, but he has left a legacy, which I feel makes him one of Britians best Modern furniture designers.

William Plunkett was a gunner with 12 years of army service behind him; now he is an internationally known designer and maker of modern furniture and the winner of two ColD Design Awards in one year. Appropriately enough, the award winning Reigate rocking chair- now something of a classic-formed the basis of the first range of furniture marketed by Mr Plunkett and, with its twin award-winning Coulsdon table, typifies his approach to the design of furniture.

The first rocking chair was produced as a result of a Kennedy-inspired request from Mr Plunkett's father-in-law, and was designed and developed in the way that the designer still works. After sketching out some basic ideas Mr Plunkett used his own mastery of metal-working to make two or three prototypes. After thus perfecting the method of construction and ensuring that the chair was comfortable, Mr Plunkett himself made the first few chairs to meet orders from friends. Later, the frames were bought from a sub-contractor, with the designer keeping a very close check on quality. All his furniture is still designed and made in this way, with assembly, finishing and checking being done by the designer's own staff.
With the rocking chair Mr Plunkett took special care to make sure that the centre of gravity was placed so that the chair can be rocked or kept at a particular comfortable angle. The thinness of the cushions belies the comfort of the chair, for Pirelli webbing provides a great deal of the necessary give; back support is particularly good. Made by William Plunkett Limited, Croydon. Designed by William Plunkett, MSIA.

Mr Plunkett's design career began slowly; "I spent six months after leaving the army turning down all the usual kind of jobs offered by the army resettlement office.. Then one day I said I liked drawing and was promptly sent to the Council of Industrial Design. The ColD recommended a design course, and I went to the Kingston School of Art to study basic design and, later, furniture design and sculpture. I then worked for a time as a designer with A. and R. Duckworth Ltd." William Plunkett Ltd was founded in January 1963.

This high-backed version of the Reigate rocking chair has won the award. It has a steel frame finished in dark grey nylon coating and the seat and back supports are polished and anodised aluminium alloy. Upholstery is to the customer's orders; the polyether foam cushions are thin because Pirelli webbing provides the necessary give. The upholstery fabric is secured internally to prevent rucking. The whole chair is carefully balanced so that it can be rocked or kept at a comfortable angle.
ble angle.

This 1966 design is part of a system of similarly-designed items that can be used separately or as super-cool modular items (should you have a long wall to fill), this one featuring a high back, anodised aluminium legs and upholstered foam 'barrels' for that distinctive shape and comfort. if that's a bit too simple, armrests are available as an option

THINGS IN MY HOME - PATRICK HUGHES ORIGINAL SCREENPRINT

I came across this original signed screenprint at a car boot in London and snapped it up as I loved it. I then went onto the internet and looked Patrick Hughes up. I decided to phone him and chat to him about his work. He was a lovely man and very friendly, so friendly he sent me a signed book of his with a lovely postcard in it. Since then I have collected a few of his prints. I particularly like his work from 1970 - 1980. I think he is up there with other British Op artist's of the time, including Paolozzi and Tilson, Terry Frost.

Patrick Hughes was born in Birmingham, England in October 1939. His first exhibition was in 1961 and his first reverspective was made in 1964. He has been exhibiting with Angela Flowers Gallery since 1970.

Hughes' early works were often playful, putting things back to front or squashing them flat, like Clown (1963) and Liquorice Allsorts (1960), setting words against images, like One Two (1962), or against themselves, like Tick Cross (1962). He explored visual oxymorons and paradoxes.[1] His fascination with the illusion of perspective began with works like Infinity (1963), Three Doors (1964) and The Space Ruler (1965).

In the 1970s Hughes hung his investigations of perception and illusion on the motif of the rainbow in a series of prints and paintings, such as Pile of Rainbows (1973), Prison Rainbow (1973) and Leaning on a Landscape (1979). Later prints like Leaf Art (1975) and paintings like Realistic Paint (1977) expressed similar interests with colour.[2]

His first "reverse perspective" or "reverspective" was Sticking Out Room (1964), which was a life-size room for the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1970. He returned to explore the possibilities of reverspective in 1990 with Up the Line and Down the Road (1991) [1] Since then, his reverspectives have been shown in London, New York, Santa Monica, Seoul, Chicago, Munich and Toronto.

RIP - ARNE VODDER - THE BEST IN DANISH DESIGN - 1926 / 2009

Hi all I have just read that one of the Greatest Danish Designers has passed away on the December the 27th. He was Arne Vodder, a true innovator in his use of colour and a master cabinet maker if there ever was one. Rest in Peace your designs will live on forever.

Danish architect and designer Arne Vodder should be counted among the most influential Scandinavian mid-century designers. His beautiful designs were nicely detailed and modest in their expression, almost without exception based on natural materials. Rosewood and teak - according to the fashion at the time - seem to have been the preferred materials. Today, Vodder is perhaps most appreciated for his beautiful rosewood and teak sideboards designed in the 1950-1960's and produced by Sibast

BEST OF DANISH DESIGN - HANS J WEGNER

There is no disputing it, he is the Grand Daddy, The Godfather of Danish Design. Hans J Wegner!. With an almost limitless design catalogue one can see why. A true original never probably to be surpassed.

Hans Jørgen Wegner, (April 2, 1914 - January 26, 2007), was one of the most innovative and prolific of all Danish furniture designers that made mid-century Danish design internationally popular. His work belongs to a modernist school that preserves function. He is probably best known for his many chairs of genuine craftmanship.

He worked as an assistant to Erik Møller and Arne Jacobsen until 1943, helping on their design for the Århus Town Hall, and adding some of his own furniture. In 1943 he opened his own office and came out with the Chinese chair which, along with his 1949 "Round" chair would provide the basis for many of his later chairs.

Interiors magazine, in America, put the Round chair on the cover in 1950 and called it 'the world's most beautiful chair,' catapulting Wegner into international fame and sparking a profitable export market. It became known simply as,The Chair and began making high profile appearances like the televised 1961 presidential debates between Nixon and Kennedy . Of the design Wegner said, "many foreigners have asked me how we made the Danish style. And I've answered that it...was rather a continuous process of purification, and for me of simplification, to cut down to the simplest possible elements of four legs, a seat and combined top rail and arm rest."

While "the Chair" is the probably the chief icon of Wegner's career, and a form that he revisits often, he is responsible for a number of other designs. He and Johannes Hansen exhibited a joint project at the Cabinetmakers show every year from 1941-66, Wegner claiming that it was "more like a game...we had to have something to display every autumn." His own chair designs from those decades, manufactured primarily today by PP Møbler, were made with the modern, sculptural idea that they could stand on their own, rather than as parts of a furniture set. The Peacock chair from 1947, with a slatted back rest fanning out to evoke the bird's plume, was inspired by the traditional "Windsor" chair. His 1949 Folding Chair hung on the wall, and his Shell chair from the same year experimented with curving the wood in three dimensions to form the seat. The multi-purpose Valet Chair, designed in 1953, had elements for hanging up or storing each piece of a Mans Suit. The backrest is carved to be used as a coat hanger, pants can be hung on a rail at the edge of the seat and everything else can be stowed in a storage space underneath the seat.

Inspired by classical portraits of Danish merchants sitting in Ming chairs, Wegner created series of chairs that helped establish Denmark as an international leader of modern design. Of this seies the Wishbone Chair is widely considered to be his most successful design.

In the early 1960s he came out with several variations on the Bull chair which came with or without horns, and was a fine example of the line Wegner could masterfully walk between elegance and playfulness. "We must take care," he once said, "that everything doesn't get so dreadfully serious. We must play - but we must play seriously." In his later years he continued to design chairs and has also worked with lighting, such as the Pole lamp created in 1976 with his daughter Marianne. A true craftsman, Wegner stated that, "the chair does not exist. The good chair is a task one is never completely done with."

World renowned for blending a variety of natural material in his classic designs, Hans Wegner has received many international accolades for his work, among them : "the Triennale" 1951, 1954 and 1957; "Royal Society of Arts" London 1959; "Citations of Merit" Pratt Institute, New York 1959 and the "International Design award", New York, 1957.

In June 1997 Wegner was awarded an Honary Doctorate by the The Royal College of Art in London.

Hans J. Wegner died in Copenhagen 26th January 2007 at the age of 92. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.