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Sitting pretty: Meet the men making designer furniture affordable

Rhiannon Harries
Sunday 27 September 2009 00:00 BST
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The world of furniture design is built around the same line of division one finds in fashion. On one side are the creations of virtuoso designers, whose unique vision comes with an eye-wateringly expensive price tag. On the other are the mass-market pieces with which those of us with shallower pockets furnish our homes – less expensive and, sadly, often less inspiring.

But while in fashion the past decade has seen the high-street emergence of a raft of designer collaborations and savvy mid- market labels, giving consumers an attractive compromise between design, quality and affordability, the choice for furniture buyers often seems disappointingly stark.

It was this vacuum that Paul Newman was keen to address when he set up the design collective Case four years ago, envisaging it as an intermediary between top design talent and big stores, whose furniture departments tend to be a homogeneous landscape of pieces bought in from faceless suppliers.

Drawing on his 20 years of experience in the industry, Newman has been able to marry the creativity and expertise of a small, hand-picked group of acclaimed designers – including Matthew Hilton and the much fêted veteran Robin Day – with the high-volume sales of big retailers, thus driving down production costs and bringing high-end products to market at relatively modest prices.

Case is testing the formula at high-street stalwart John Lewis as part of the department store's drive to put its furniture department back on the retail map. One of only four brands chosen to represent the new direction of the contemporary-home section at John Lewis's Oxford Street flagship and online store, Case features alongside the similarly covetable Vitra, Kartell and Content by Conran.

Case's award-winning range, now exclusive to John Lewis, is a well-edited selection of quietly elegant pieces focused mainly on dining and living spaces. From Hilton's sturdy but finely balanced oak dining table to Nazanin Kamali's voluptuously tapered floor lamp and Day's cubic oak and leather chair, it is design so perfect that initially you barely notice its sophistication; each item just feels instinctively right. It is the kind of stuff that makes you want to throw out everything in your house and start again.

While prices are not on a scale that would allow many of us to snap up the lot in one go – a large birch mirror by Kamali comes in at just over £300, a sofa by Hilton just under £2,000 – they are significantly lower than you might pay in the sort of upmarket boutiques that are usually the preserve stockists for pieces of this quality.

"It's not 'cheap' furniture," emphasises Hilton. Nor is it meant to be – a large part of Case's goal is to overcome a commonly held belief that contemporary furniture is somehow less likely to stand the test of time, and to convince people that it can represent good value in terms of both its aesthetic and physical durability.

"When we were working with Marks & Spencer a while back, they did lots of focus groups and one thing they came back with that I could never understand was that people thought that modern furniture should be cheaper than traditional furniture," says Newman. "People see it as transitory and think they are going to need to change it in a couple of years. While I think Ikea is fantastic and I have no criticism of it, I do believe it has a disposability that has become linked to contemporary design."

Consequently, Newman is keen to distance contemporary furniture from its image as a simple extension of fashion: "One of the things people always ask me is, 'What are the trends for spring 2010?' or 'What is the new colour?' And the truth is, I have no idea. I don't actually care, because it isn't about making fashionable stuff.

"Anything that is good will transcend that superficial bit. We get asked what we are doing from an environmental point of view and my response is simply that we try to make stuff properly so that people are going to keep it for 20 or 30 years and pass it on. It's a practical challenge of balancing performance, function, aesthetic and cost, and that's what interests me."

It's no easy feat, particularly in terms of keeping prices within the reach of high-street shoppers, and it requires a flexible approach from Case's designers that is something of a rarity in an industry whose borders often blur with those of the fine-art world. But Hilton, whose design CV is studded with awards and accolades, relishes the challenge.

"What we all have in common at Case is that we all think about things in a commercial way, which can sound bad, but simply means we know how to work around things that you could see as a compromise and get the best out of the situation," he says.

"As a designer, compromises have negative connotations but they are part of what you need to drive what you do – I see them more as criteria or necessary elements. How much can you sell something for? Does it have to be flat-packed? You build up a number of restrictions and all those things that could become problems become things that you work through finding solutions."

Newman agrees that this attitude is the key to catering to a wider market successfully: "Matthew is very good because he listens to people. So he listens to a junior buyer at John Lewis when he says, 'We didn't sell that in brown because there weren't any chairs to go with it.' Some people might say, 'Well, I want to make it brown,' but if you want to work without restrictions, then you should be doing sculpture or fine art. We make furniture and it does have issues about strength and durability – there are lots of things to take into consideration.

"If you look back at Arne Jacobsen, any of those iconic furniture designers, they were making furniture commercially, to sell, and that has proved to be very valid."

So are consumers ready to abandon the "buy-it-cheap, regret-it-later" mentality that has dominated spending habits of recent years? "You can never be sure," Newman admits. "But I do think it's cyclical and there is a genuine feeling about buying less and better now. The success of this range will be a test of that, and there are bound to be some things that don't work. That's the risk you take when you try something new." n

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