John Makepeace's language of furniture

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Lily Crowther explores the work of an innovative traditionalist

When John Makepiece (b.1939), one of Britain’s leading furniture designers, started his career, in the 1960s and early 1970s, his work was often characterized by hard edges and bright colours, making use of modern materials such as plastics. He has an unusually diverse portfolio and started out making furniture for Heal’s, Liberty, Harrod’s and even Habitat, and undertaking contract furnishing work for universities and businesses. His aesthetic during this period is typified by Playtime, a column of drawers made for the National Museum of Wales in 1973. Here he used sycamore wood and an assortment of coloured acrylics to create a highly legible piece of furniture with an educational purpose, namely to teach the museum’s visitors about its construction.

Despite having been influenced as a young designer by the Bauhaus and Minimalism, Makepeace soon came to feel that the linear forms of machine-produced timber were unsatisfactory and compromised. He explains that: ‘I want a desk to be able to respond to the person sitting at it, rather than its being a rectangle because that’s the easiest form to come off a machine’. In pursuing the modernist doctrine that form follows function, he moved away from modernist forms, which he considers ‘adequate but not excellent’ for furniture’s human-centred functions. He quickly realized that he would have to choose between designing simple, modern furniture that could be sold at an affordable price, or making individual pieces that could command a high enough value to support his desire to explore the limits of his craft and materials. He chose the latter route, and developed the more lyrical approach that characterizes his later work. With his change of approach came a move to the Dorset countryside, which allowed him to escape the financial and media pressures of city life and to concentrate on running his workshop.

Makepeace had begun his career with great faith in William Morris’ Arts and Crafts philosophy that the individual craftsman should be both designer and maker. Perhaps unexpectedly, as he moved away from large-scale contract work and focused on one-off commissions, he became increasingly convinced of the importance of business skills and delegation as the keys to a successful career as a designer. His main role now is in generating ideas rather than making, although his designs are informed by years spent working at the bench.

It was his personal experience of the difficulty of obtaining a rounded education in design and entrepreneurial skills that motivated Makepeace to set up Parnham College in 1977. Parnham offered an intensive course in furniture design, craftsmanship and business management to an impressive roster of students, from the arch-traditionalist David Linley to the industrial designer Konstantin Grcic. During the 1980s, the school at Parnham was complemented by the purchase of a forest site at nearby Hooke Park. Makepeace and the German architect and engineer Frei Otto (b.1925) used Hooke Park to explore the potential of timber thinnings in building, in collaboration with a group of European universities. Together they established new ways to exploit the strengths of this material, previously seen as a waste product, and used it to build a series of beautiful and sustainable structures. Hooke Park is now owned by the Architectural Association, whose students visit regularly to learn about timber construction techniques.

His feeling for wood unites the naturalistic structures and motifs of Makepeace’s furniture with the ecological drive behind the work at Hooke Park. He describes human beings and wood as ‘compatible friends’, and after 50 years in the business he remains awed by wood’s possibilities and its infinite diversity. He has a romantic view of trees, their embeddedness in a local landscape and the fact that ‘a tree is a history… it tells its own biography’. He also sees nature as a humbling role model for the designer: ‘what an amazing lesson for us – if nature has designed this, to be lean, to be effective, efficient and beautiful, it really gives designers little chance to excel’. His aim is to make furniture that preserves the vital qualities of the wood, its ‘tension’ and ‘resonance’; he invokes the analogy of a musical instrument, an object whose beauty derives from its precise engineering.

Makepeace’s extraordinary attention to detail has been a constant throughout his career. For example, his handles are often strikingly clever and subtle – on the Trilogy three-sided desk (c.1990), little finger-holds provide all the assistance needed to swivel each drawer, and on the Obelisk chest of drawers (c.1987) the sinuous channels at each corner serve as grips. The surface finishes are also carefully considered, with the English oak of the Sylvan chairs (c.1985) looking almost like horse-hair, finely textured along the grain.

The new Zebras series of cabinets brings many of these preoccupations together. In their rectilinear shape and bold Chinese red interiors, they recall the confident and playful modernism of Makepeace’s early work. The marquetry stripes on their exteriors, made from alternating dark and light wood veneers, combine technical virtuosity with a respect for nature’s pattern-making skills. The handles are strategically placed to disappear into the black stripes, in the sort of careful gesture one has come to expect from Makepeace. Zebras represents a rehabilitation of marquetry for the modern age – the technique fell out of favour because it was impossible to mechanize, but it can now be achieved using CAD and laser-cutting. Makepeace is thrilled by the possibilities of this new technology, exemplifying his curious blend of traditionalism and innovation.

Makepeace’s work was shown recently at the Embankment Galleries, Somerset House, London. It was a shame that the design of this exhibition was somewhat unsympathetic to the objects, with awkward pastel-coloured plinths. The exhibits were also relatively small in number and mostly quite small in size, making it difficult to gain a full picture of Makepeace’s work. There were no grand dramatic gestures on the scale of his limed oak table for Liberty (1975), with its tree-trunk legs. Even so, the Embankment Galleries of Somerset House provided an ideal setting, grand yet relatively domestic in scale, suggesting how it might feel to live with a Makepeace.

The accompanying catalogue, John Makepeace: Enriching the Language of Furniture (The Devon Guild of Craftsmen, 2010), is small and slim but very attractively designed. It includes an essay by Jeremy Myerson, the Helen Hamlyn Professor of Design at the Royal College of Art, who explores the trajectory of Makepeace’s career, with many insights into his personal life and motivations. Myerson also illustrates a few of the designer’s most impressive larger commissions that were not included in the exhibition. The book includes images and extended captions for most of the exhibition objects, arranged thematically to give a sense of some of Makepeace’s key interests. The more serious scholar would want to read Myerson’s monograph Makepeace: A Spirit of Adventure in Craft and Design (London: Conran Octopus, 1995), but this catalogue is more than just a souvenir of the show – it is an elegant summary of why Makepeace has been, and continues to be, so influential in British furniture.

These books show how broad in scope Makepeace’s career has been, encompassing innovation and entrepreneurship as well as meticulous application of traditional craft skills. Since his one-off pieces are mainly owned by private collectors, the catalogue gives a rare glimpse of this unusual work.