Category: chair craft

On another tack: The Lutyens Bench. Everybody will immediately recognize this bench as The Lutyens Bench. Actually it is called the Thakeham Bench.

A granddaughter of Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869-1944), Candia Lutyens, started Lutyens Furniture Limited in the UK

She writes about Lutyens:

Edwin Lutyens is often described as the greatest British architect of his age. …
.. That Lutyens was a designer of furniture is not well known. His designs, though numerous, were always produced in small quantities and for a specific effect that was always a complement to the whole. Sadly, almost no Lutyens’s interiors survive intact and many pieces of furniture have been lost. Thus it is that Lutyens’ furniture has never become part of the general consciousness, although on the merits of the designs alone it should rank with, and take its natural place alongside the furniture of all the ‘Twentieth Century Greats’. As with his architecture, Lutyens in his furniture designs makes specific reference to, and is influenced by, the substance and course of the great English tradition of furniture making.
Similarly too, the form, the style and the synergy all bear the stamp of his own individuality. Precise and intricate mathematical details lend an element of surprise and Lutyens’ well-renowned love of jokes and ‘visual puns’ is self-evident in many of the tricks he employs. The result is, like many of his buildings, absolutely controlled yet somehow astonishing – at first sight conventional, yet encompassing at a second glance both the whimsical and the paradoxical. In making Lutyens’ furniture to his own drawings, the task of Lutyens Furniture Limited was both unique and daunting in its application. Our responsibility to the designs dictated that our prime and overriding principle is that the quality of what we produce should be as high as is possible to achieve. We therefore go to considerable lengths to employ the best craftsmanship that is available, in using traditional methods of construction and upholstery, and to comply with Lutyens’ own tastes in terms of materials and timbers. As a result, we have total confidence that these pieces will continue for generations as furniture always used to and as it should.

Candia Lutyens via Lutyens Furniture Limited.

About the Thakeham Bench Candia writes:

The Thakeham seat pictured here in English Oak was designed for the garden at Little Thakeham near Storrington, West Sussex. The rhythmical symmetry of the bench is typical of Lutyens’s love of form. The bench has become an archetypal design in its own right and has sadly, for many, lost its association with Lutyens. It is made all over the world to varying degress of quality (absense thereof). There are no makers of this bench other than LFL that are authorised by the Lutyens family.

I believe it is a bit like aspirin. Aspirin originally was a brand name for a pill Bayer developed. Later on aspirin became a name for anti headache pills in it’s own right, whereupon Bayer lost its intellectual property rights.