In the beginning – 1987

Our very first product was the Napoleon Chair designed in 1919 for Lutyens’s own home.  We had tried and failed to get Casina, the Italian furniture maker to incorporate it into their “Architectural Range” so we decided it to take the plunge and give it a go on our own.

Having made the prototype, we needed to photograph it and our great and very old friend Nic Espinosa, Director of the dance school The London Studio Centre and chairman of British Ballet Organisation agreed to shoot it for us.  This he did in his dance studios at the LSC in King’s Cross.  While the shoot was in progress, a young ballet student wandered into the studio looking for her class.  Seizing the opportunity, we grabbed her!

The end result was not only our very first product shot but also our first Christmas card.
Apologies to those of you that have seen it before but we feel that this spontaneous image of the young dancer is as enduring as that of the chair itself – a timeless classic.

As regular readers of this blog will know, we are thrilled to be forging a new relationship with Fortuny of Venice and New York.  We have now developed our first product that has been specifically designed by LFL around Fortuny’s wonderful fabrics and we call it the Lozenge Lantern.  Based on the lozenge motif, often used in Lutyens’s detailing, this particular example is 664mm overall height and 663mm, (roughly 26”) diameter at the edge of the canopy.  It can be made to a smaller size and it can be made either with the fabric exposed or for use in outdoor, (but covered and protected) spaces with the fabric sandwiched  between two panes of glass. I plan to visit New York the week of the 23^rd April and will be presenting Lutyens Furniture & Lighting at the Fortuny showroom at a time yet to be confirmed. Whilst on the subject of new lighting product, we are also very pleased to show off our new variant on the Cardinal Hat light, a standing lamp.  The fitting is suspended from a swivel arm on an adjustable upright stand.  As with other versions of the Cardinal Hat light, a variety of finishes, tassel and cable colour are available and we believe that this variant could also work extremely well as a table lamp.

Time flies! It was 1991 when we asked to design a set of furniture for the wine cellar at Wilsford Manor. Wilsford was finished in 1906, on the site of an older house, by Detmar Blow, a good friend of Lutyens and one of the very few other architects with whom Lutyens considered going into practice. In Blow, Lutyens had a direct link back to the greats of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris and John Ruskin and there is little doubt that his influence would have been felt in much of Lutyens’s early work.

Wilsford was built for the Tennant family and inherited in 1920 by Stephen Tennant, one time lover of Seigfried Sassoon and much photographed by Cecil Beaton who was, “one of the first to encourage Tennant’s eccentric vocation of doing nothing in life -  but doing it with great originality and flamboyance”. Reputedly, Tennant spent the last 17 years of his life in bed and for the last 50 of his 81 years worked on a single unfinished novel.

The interior design was done by Syrie Maugham who, by co-incidence, collaborated 1936 with Robert Lutyens,(Edwin’s son) on Brook House on Park Lane in London at about the same time.
On Stephen Tennant’s death in 1987, Wilsford was sold and it’s -often-bizarre- contents auctioned.
The new owner had grand plans for the wine cellar and asked us to design a large table to accommodate subterranean dinner parties. To go with the table were a dozen or so chairs, many of them able to be dismantled for easy storage, servery units and the wine trolleys.  The latter were made with wheel bearings from BMW and tires from Pirelli.  The metal basket that held the wine was hand forged.  No attention to detail was spared.

Latest news from Lutyens Furniture & Lighting.. A Tale of a Table Time flies! It was 1991 when we asked to design a set of furniture for the wine cellar at Wilsford Manor. Wilsford was finished in 1906, on the site of an older house, by Detmar Blow, a good friend of Lutyens and one of the very few other architects with whom Lutyens considered going into practice. In Blow, Lutyens had a direct link back to the greats of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris and John Ruskin and there is little doubt that his influence would have been felt in much of Lutyens’s early work. Wilsford was built for the Tennant family and inherited in 1920 by Stephen Tennant, one time lover of Seigfried Sassoon and much photographed by Cecil Beaton who was, “one of the first to encourage Tennant’s eccentric vocation of doing nothing in life -  but doing it with great originality and flamboyance”. Reputedly, Tennant spent the last 17 years of his life in bed and for the last 50 of his 81 years worked on a single unfinished novel. The interior design was done by Syrie Maugham who, by co-incidence, collaborated 1936 with Robert Lutyens,(Edwin’s son) on Brook House on Park Lane in London at about the same time. On Stephen Tennant’s death in 1987, Wilsford was sold and it’s -often-bizarre- contents auctioned. The new owner had grand plans for the wine cellar and asked us to design a large table to accommodate subterranean dinner parties. To go with the table were a dozen or so chairs, many of them able to be dismantled for easy storage, servery units and the wine trolleys.  The latter were made with wheel bearings from BMW and tires from Pirelli.  The metal basket that held the wine was hand forged.  No attention to detail was spared. New Website We are really pleased to announce the launch of our newly rebuilt website.  We hope that you will find it easier to navigate, more modern in look and functionality and a better browsing experience.  Having been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century we also now have live feeds to Twitter and Facebook and a link to our blog where you will find, amongst other things, back copies of this news letter.  Also, in response to several requests, we have now put printable “tear sheets” on every page.  They take in most but not all of our product.  They will remain work in progress for a little while, so if you see “coming soon” we promise you it is.  We hope you enjoy looking at the site and we would really appreciate any feedback. Of the several pieces made, the table was and remains the most interesting.  We had to make sure that the oak was compatible with the controlled humidity of the wine cellar.  It was based on the Drogo kitchen table but the client wanted to avoid the large stretcher rail of the latter in order to be able to sit comfortably around it.  The result we came up with was a cantilevered rail with the legs inset.  The table itself was a complicated combination of D-ends, free standing insets and leaves expanding from an 8-seater to one that could seat 16-20.  This was a monumental, architectural beast of a table that we have only made once subsequent to the Wilsford job and which now lives in Australia.  Born of Lutyens, to fit a Detmar Blow space and developed for purpose by LFL, it is a piece we are immensely proud of and look forward to building again. Check out the new website here  follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend Copyright © 2012 Lutyens Furniture & Lighting, All rights reserved.  unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences

Very early Lutyens furniture was largely influenced by the Arts & Crafts movement.  Many pieces from this epoch exist in the hands of his family but very few drawings survive.  Examples amongst our own collection are the Edwin Napoleon Chair, and the Rush Settle.

As time progressed, with the commission for New Delhi and also for various London buildings, Lutyens turned to his less recent history. It would appear he was influenced by “A History of English Furniture” by Percy MacQuoid, published in 1904 and still regarded as the first serious study of the subject.

However, whereas Lutyens’s contemporaries such as Lloyd-Wright, Mackintosh and Le Corbusier were trying to rationalise and simplify historical designs, these were clearly secondary considerations; rather he pursued a new interpretation of historical style.  He reinvents scale and complicates detail.  The end result is surprising and “strange”, both beautiful and familiar but perplexing and extraordinarily challenging for any poor furniture maker, (as we well know!).

Some years ago we met by chance with Paul Keating, former Prime Minister of Australia and a great enthusiast of and expert on Lutyens.  He remarked that he found it difficult to understand why he – Lutyens – had to make the furniture designs “all so f***ing complicated”!

To illustrate this, we have decided to focus on four desk chairs.  All are extraordinarily beautiful works of art and all are historical derivatives of English chair making and Lutyens imagination and extraordinary creativity.

Desk Chair

In his own desk chair – derived from the Queen Anne style – of which we own and use the original today, we have a simple beginning to the progression.  We don’t know when he had his own chair made, though we do know that he later drew it for use in Delhi and it was realised, as evidenced by the Delhi photo archives.  Jill Lever comments on it in her book, Architects Designs for Furniture (1982).

Below: His own desk chair design.

Derived from this is the Mansfield Chair, which offers a throne-like presence by over-scaling the arm detail and adding the cross bracing of the legs.  It is an imposing statement for an imposing user, (See lower right)
Below: Mansfield chair.

“A little Belgian detective” of literary fame but oh well!).

The Midland Bank insignia chair is possibly the most complex of any chair in our collection.  The back is dished both vertically and horizontally and the monogram is in relief.  It lends a nod and a wink to Chippendale but then goes further.  We offer the chair with initials other than M and B and design every monogram to follow the spirit of Lutyens’s intentions.

The Pall Mall Chair is the most interesting of all and, despite all the many drawings attached to it, we have never been able to find the original piece.  The arm detail culminates in a swan’s neck on the horizontal; a movement on from the tucked under curve of the other three.  The fluid “S” shape of the arm to lower leg stretcher flows within the circumference of the circular seat.

Pall Mall

We know that Lutyens loved this design as he used it in not only Pall Mall, (for which we have named it) but also in Delhi.  And in Delhi, he drew it again with a “C” replacing the “S”, (unrealised as far as we know).  It is the culmination of his experimentation with chair design.  It is also beautifully drafted with a care to detail that is sometimes lacking in his earlier pieces – nothing is left to chance for the maker and, though we generally make modern drawings from his originals, in this case the attention to detail is beyond perfection and left us with nothing to question.

The common thread through these four chairs – and in fact in most of Lutyens’s designs for furniture – is that he works not only by placing elements together rationally, but that the design is contrived by working from a solid and then carefully removing the superfluous.  In other words, it is , in its own way, sculpture!

Lutyens at the Ashmoleon – an unfinished detective story?

A little while ago, our head of design happened to find himself at the Ashmoleon Museum in Oxford.  Associated with the University of Oxford, the Ashmoleon contains a world-renowned collection of Western applied arts and antiquities.  
The aforementioned found himself in the room containing their collection of stringed instruments including some very special violins and cellos by Stradivarius.  To his surprise, he recognised the display cases as entirely indicative of Lutyens’s hand.    Subsequently we have had a dialogue with the Ashmoleon and taken our own photos.  It transpires that most of the cases are reproductions of a single first case, which they acquired several decades ago, (consistent with Lutyens’s dates).  These they have made themselves in different sizes.  They have no record of how they acquired the first but, in principal, agree from what we have told and shown them that our view of likely authorship is probably right.
Some time on from the Ashmoleon discovery, (which was made a couple of years ago) we were interested earlier this year to see this bookcase in an auction catalogue.  Its provenance was impeccable and though markedly different to the display cases it also bears some marked similarities.  If you lose the Gothic arches at the base of the bookcase, the remainder of the base itself is remarkably similar to that of the Ashmoleon cabinet.  The Tuscan columns are Lutyens through and through, (see our Marsh Court table above); the symmetrical dividers and pediment of the bookcase are also very Lutyens though not “on display” in the cabinet.

Sadly the Ashmoleon don’t seem to have kept a record of which of the cabinets was their original, (they are presented with one, two and three central columns) though it is likely that this could be determined without too much difficulty and an expert eye.  Our efforts to get them to acknowledge Lutyens in the room have so far fallen on deaf ears but we remain on the case!

Lutyens Unrealised 

This month in the “unrealised” section, we have chosen a chair designed for New Delhi with a circular seat, semi-circular fanned back with caned panels and an extravagant under structure of hoops and pentagonal legs.  This is an interesting chair for several reasons.  First it absolutely epitomises what we believe to be the case of most of Lutyens’s furniture intended for New Delhi – that it was almost certainly never made.  Secondly, though the heading has been cut from the cropped drawing here, it reads: “N.W. wing, upper basement floor, sitting room.  N^o 2 required.”  We could quite easily put an estimate on what a pair of these chairs might cost to make today and, even allowing for local craftsmanship, one can only imagine what a hole in any budget this level of detail in an insignificant space might have led to in the context of the wider scheme.  And it was quite some detail – this single chair, (N^o 2 required) was drawn up in no less than three drawings, (furniture drawing n^os 653, 654 and 655) with nothing left to chance; all for a sitting room in an “upper basement”.

One of the things that we are really interested in when it comes to Lutyens’s body of work is the sheer amount of it turned out by a relatively small office, (tiny by today’s standards) and the degree to which he was able to turn his eye from the magnificent big picture to the minutiae of detail and several hundred pieces of furniture.

If, as seems highly likely, the chair wasn’t made, it is all too apparent why not but the legacy of the drawings gives us a wonderful opportunity to study his games of geometry and architectural language.  As often is the case, the circle and semi-circle are predominant features, as is the interplay with circle and triangle with the three half hoops of the under structure, (see our occasional table for another example of this) but added intricacy of detail comes in on the pentagonal foot, (which gets drawing 654 almost to itself!).

This is a great piece of furniture in terms of its form but even we have to concede that it is hard to assign it much function!  Neither a dining chair nor for lounging in and with an extravagance of detail that would hardly render it economical, its place isn’t entirely obvious.  It is, however, a statement that is unique and, in the right setting could be quite magnificent.

The Billiard Light

Lutyens probably first designed this billiard light for Marshcourt in 1901.   He used it again in Delhi and at least two other houses, Heathcote Manor and Gledstone Hall, the latter competed in the early 20s.  On the original drawings, no material was specified but we are sure they were all made from timber.  For this reason – it not being strong enough to deal with the structural forces in play – none survive.  We have in fact seen the remains of the Gledstone light in bits in a box, very sad!