THE strength and the curse of British suburbia is our scorn of anything that comes with a whiff of pretension attached. It saves us from the adulation of smart-alec designer twaddle that you encounter on the Continent. Or, worse still, Islington. But it also limits us. Our first instinct is to sneer at anything too slick.
Or so we like to think, anyway. The fact that several thousand North London suburbanites rioted at midnight recently for the chance to buy a few Swedish sofas on the cheap suggests that we are more susceptible to fine design — or the hype accompanying it — than we like to admit.
Nevertheless, the word designer, especially if prefaced by the adjective “trendy”, is often greeted in suburban circles with derision. Our gut feeling is that designers supply the frills of daily life, not the nuts and bolts. It is a prejudice to which I myself have been prone. But is it misplaced? How much difference have designers made to everyday objects in my humble Hendon terrace? As the Design Museum in London (in conjunction with The Times and MFI) launches the Designer of the Year award with a show of the four shortlisted nominees, it seemed like a good time to find out.
So I invited the show’s curator, the design historian Libby Sellers, to venture out of her customary chic habitat and into untrendy NW4 to cast a professional eye over the “jumble in the jungle”, as my mother-in-law once described our living room. It would be an encounter just like those on The Antiques Roadshow — except without the antiques. (I forbade Sellers from commenting on my clothes.) Here is what she said about ten household objects that we all take for granted.
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TEAPOT
Kelvin MacKenzie once scathingly defined Radio 4’s output as “documentaries about the history of the teapot”. But it turns out that the history of the teapot is grippingly controversial. “There’s a bitter debate about how it got its bulbous shape,” Sellers says. “Some people say it came from 16th-century China; they had pots with wide mouths. But tea historians say this is rubbish: tea was never drunk in that format. Others say Islamic coffee-pots had an influence. But I think that the teapot is a classic case of people feeling comfortable with a form that has nothing to do with function.”
In short, we have come to love the teapot’s bulbous shape for deep, dark psychological reasons that would doubtless have furnished Sigmund Freud with several tomes of dirty-minded conjectures. More tea, vicar?
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CLOCK RADIO
“I’m sorry,” I say to Sellers. “All I have is this boring old Sony thing.”
“Well, boring old Sony is not so boring,” she replies, reminding me of the revolution that hit consumer electronics 50 years ago. While Western firms were churning out coffin-sized “radiograms”, a small-time Tokyo businessman called Akio Morita was quietly developing transistorised radios that you could slip in your pocket. The craze caught on, and his company — called Sony because he wanted to suggest to Americans both the words “sonic” and “sonny” (as in a small, lively lad) — has never looked back.
Nor has it changed its winning formula. Sellers surveys the clock radio with reverence. “It’s streamlined, easy to see, you didn’t need complicated instructions to set it up, the sound quality is probably superb and it’s reliable.”
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A thing of design beauty, then. Exactly what crosses my mind at 6.45 each morning when its merry prattle rouses me to the joys of a new dawn.
TABLE LAMP
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I knew that our “smart lamps” — curvy stainless-steel things that can be made to glow brighter simply by touching them — would impress Sellers. “Wow, that’s pure, fantastic functionality,” she enthuses, as I demonstrate how they work with an insouciant flick of a fingertip. “It’s a huge advance, when you think that it wasn’ t until the 1920s that lamps even had switches.” I hate to tell her that we picked up two for £14.99 from Argos.
MICROWAVE
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I am rather proud of our elegant grey microwave with its chunky handle and oval “hello sailor” porthole. But I sense that, to Sellers’s expert eye, the whole microwave tradition is a design embarrassment. “After 30 years, it’s still basically a box,” she says sadly. “The technology has advanced — all those clever timers — but not the styling.”
She relents slightly. “At least yours doesn’t have a rectangular window.” Still, she reminds me of something interesting. “Microwaves came about by accident, you know.” It’s true. In the 1940s an engineer called Percy Spencer was developing a radar-based vacuum-tube when he noticed that a Mars bar in his pocket had melted. He realised that low-density microwaves could be used for cooking, and changed the course of civilisation. (And, one hopes, his trousers.)
TELEPHONE
Morrison Towers is a museum of telephony. On the wall upstairs is a veteran 1950s round-dial model. It still works, so we keep it — much to the annoyance of our offspring, who are infuriated by having to wait for the dial to unwind. But downstairs, we have the cordless, push-button efforts now seen everywhere. “Hmm, nice big numbers for the visually impaired,” says Sellers, damning the new phones with faint phrase. Then she surveys the handset’s plastic curves. “It’s not an aesthetic I like, this childish organic style,” she says. “It’s a reaction against minimalist streamlining, I guess. I prefer your old phone.”
COMPACT DISCS
Recent innovations in recorded music have been disastrous for designers. Sellers delightedly seizes my old Sgt Pepper LP — with its wonderful Peter Blake artwork spread across a 12in square cover — and compares it with the cramped illustrations on a CD. “Shrinking a design when an object gets smaller doesn’t work,” she says.
In her view, the design of CDs should have been rethought from scratch when they were introduced in the early 1980s. But of course the latest medium for music — tracks downloaded directly from the internet — has no scope for graphic design at all. Very sad. “It’s the complete defetishisation of music,” says Sellers grandly.
PIANO
Of all the objects in the house, our grand piano — which some people call a “boudoir grand”, others a “baby grand” — is probably the best example of how a satisfying shape is naturally created when form follows function. String lengths dictate its characteristic swooping curve. But as Sellers points out, the voluptuous shape of all acoustic stringed instruments adds to our sub liminal enjoyment of the music. That’s a dimension you don’t get from a boxy electronic keyboard.
DUVET
The death of the “hospital bed corner” — that tightly-wrapped fold of sheet and blanket, imprisoning your toes like a shroud — is, says Sellers, one of the great symbols of our changing lifestyles. “But the rise of the duvet since the 1970s is not only about us being spared the labour of making our beds. It can also be attributed to the duvet’s intrinsic comforting quality.” And it surely indicates how far continental habits have changed British suburbia. Even my elderly auntie shops at Ikea now, though she doesn’t necessarily riot to get into the place.
TABLE
The only “bespoke” furniture in our house is an oval dining table, superbly carved from a single slab of oak by a Norfolk craftsman. Its acquisition was a happy accident. The table had been commissioned by a well-heeled type whose ambition in furniture (he discovered too late) was not matched by the proportions of his dining room. So the craftsman sold it to us for half its original price .
“Ours is an age that values technology above all else,” Sellers says. “But there is a growing market for natural material lovingly crafted.” Indeed there is. According to the Countryside Agency, 300,000 people now earn their living from rural crafts.
PAPERBACK
Finally, Sellers swoops on my bookcase and plucks out not some sumptuously illustrated coffee-table tome, but a paperback without any pictures at all. “Now this,” she exclaims, “is a design classic.” What she is holding is an old Penguin. Its cover design was devised in the 1930s, just like Harry Beck’s London Tube Map — and uses colour coding in exactly the same way.
Penguin has now revived this colour-coding concept, coupled with the original 1930s typography, for its new Great Ideas series. But since the team that dreamt up this happy revival is on the shortlist for Designer of the Year, I shall say no more.