On Wednesday we welcomed the London Design Festival into our Tottenham Court Road store with an evening of music, drinks and design. In amongst the packed showrooms, interiors website Houzz were busy entertaining guests with a special designer display competition dubbed the Houzz and Heal’s Shelfie Award.
Using a collection of Heal’s contemporary homewares, members of the public were challenged to create their own unique display worthy of our designer showrooms. Having picked their five top displays, they’re turning the judging over to you.
To pick your favourite Shelfie visit their website by clicking here.
[ INSPIRATION ]
At Heal's
Kicking off Heal’s London Design Festival in style, last night saw the great and the good of the design world raise a toast as part of our ‘Dinner with the Designers’ event. Transforming our Tottenham Court Road showroom into a banqueting hall fit for a feast, the evening brought together a host of internationally renowned designers including Sir Kenneth Grange, Gareth Neal, Matthew Hilton and Sebastian Cox to celebrate the best in British design. With a week of events lined up, why not join us for our LDF party where you will find three floors of music, drinks and design plus a host of exclusive workshops.
"Heal’s has been trading for over 205 years so we are one of the longest-standing design companies in the country, not just London! That’s why it’s important that during the London Design Festival we bring together the best designers and journalists for a very relaxed evening in our wonderful flagship store – the ‘home’ of good design and well-made, modern furniture. It illustrates so many of our brand values: Championing young designers, being house proud, being innovative – and, of course, offering good design, well made." Carmel Allen, Creative Director at Heal's.
Katrina Burroughs, Sebastian Cox and Hamish Mansbridge
David Steiner and Sir Kenneth Grange
Rob Scarlett
Barbara Chandler, Sarah Kay and David Nicholls
Anthony Dickens, Sebastian Cox and Melissa Muslin (Heal's Lighting Buyer)
Sir Kenneth Grange
Will Hobhouse (Heal's Chairman) and Lucy Gough
Will Hobhouse (Heal's Chairman) and Suzanne Imre
Carmel Allen (Heal's Creative Director)
This isn't the first time Heal's has had a Swedish event in store. In 1951 Heal's introduced Scandinavian furniture to the UK. It was an immediate hit and several Scandi events ensued.
In 1971 one particular Swedish event included a huge party including a 'smorgsbord' on the fourth floor, a Swedish beer cellar in the basement and a cannon from a Swedish warship which sunk in 1968 at the entrance!
Sixty-four years later we won't be having a canon in the store, but we will be one of the first places to showcase the new Volvo XC90, as the perfect example of Swedish design at its best.
We are absolutely thrilled to have 18 Swedish companies into our Tottenham Court Road store to create a Swedish design quarter and lots of interesting events too, from flower headband making (perfect for festival go-ers) and quilting, to Swedish cross-stitching techniques and knitting styles.
In our new cafe, Forge&Co will be serving 'fika' everyday - the Swedish coffee breaks with delicious Swedish food and cakes. After a little look in the archive I discovered Heal's had introduced one Swedish brand to the UK back in 1923. It was Orrefors crystal and almost a hundred years later Orrefors will be back. Testament indeed to the enduring beauty of Swedish craftsmanship and design.
Do save the date for the party on Thursday 6th August from 6pm. Hope to see you at our Svensk Sommar!
Carmel Allen, Creative Director at Heal's.
Photos from our 1951 exhibition:
Described by the Labour deputy leader, Herbert Morrison, as a "tonic for the nation", the Festival of Britain set out to convey a sense of recovery and progress after the Second World War.
The 1951 festival was a landmark for British design, and - due to the vision and energy of its employees together with the 'You've never had it so good' economy, it kickstarted a new boom period for Heal's, which continued long into the 1960s. 900 perforated chairs were produced for the Festival of Britain by AJ Milne for Heal's.
Furniture wasn't the only items Heal's exhibited at the Festival of Britain, there was also our Heal's Fabrics. Borne out of her husband Robin Day's need for a modern fabric in keeping with his furniture, in 1951 Lucienne Day created Calyx for the Festival of Britain. Initially, Tom Worthington was only lukewarm about the pattern.
Lucienne recalls: "I had already designed a couple of things for Heal's, so I took the design for Calyx along to them. Tom Worthington said he would produce it for me but would only pay me half the usual fee of 20 guineas because he was certain they wouldn't sell a yard of it. Robin used it in his section and it was so popular that Heal's entered it for an award in New York that year. Calyx won."
Over the next two decades, Lucienne went on to design more than 70 patterns for Heal's.
Like so many creative catalysts, Amedeo Modigliani set the art world ablaze for all too short a period. To celebrate such a fleeting, yet prolific talent, a new exhibition at London’s leafy Estorick Collection is giving visitors a rare chance to view his distinctive style within an intimate setting.
Bringing together a selection of works on paper, ‘Modigliani: A Unique Artistic Voice’ charts the influences and stylistic developments that helped form his revolutionary approach to the human form.
The greatness of Modigliani will, of course, not be lost on Heal’s having previously exhibited his painting ‘Le Petit Paysan’ (‘The Little Peasant’, 1919) at our very own Mansard Gallery - part of the ‘Exhibition of French Art 1914-1919’ (1919), this group show also featured little known contemporaries Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Having passed away just a year after the exhibition following a bout of meningitis, Modigiliani sadly never received widespread recognition during his lifetime. His body of work has, however, had a huge influence on subsequent generations and with beautifully curated shows such as the Estorick’s his unique voice will no doubt resonate for many years to come. Further reading: www.estorickcollection.com
Ambrose Heal had a keen interest in fine art and his involvement with painting and drawing paralleled his development as a designer, manufacturer and retailer. That’s why it's hardly surprising, given his interest in the relationship between art, design and commerce, he should set up a gallery at Heal's to show the most innovative art of the period.
Design Industries Association
A good friend of Ambrose Heal, Frank Pick (1878-1941) was not only the managing director of the London Underground during the 1920s but also a passionate advocate of design. In 1915, he and Ambrose decided to found the Design and Industries Association (DIA), of which they were active members, to promote links between designers, manufacturers and retailers.
Taking this commitment further, in 1917 Ambrose opened the Mansard Gallery within Heal’s Tottenham Court Road store with Pick providing Underground poster artwork for the first exhibition ‘Poster Pictures’. Many of those same graphic artists whose work was featured were commissioned to design posters for Heal’s newest space, including Pick's star designer Edward McKnight Kauffer who produced artwork for each of the London Group’s shows (one of the oldest artist led organisations in the world).
The Bloomsbury Set
The fourth floor gallery was a well-known spot frequented by Bloomsbury group luminaries such as Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis. Such was his connection to the Mansard that in 1920 Lewis used the venue to host his ‘Group X’ show, bringing together a number painters and sculptors from the British Vorticist movement.
Celebrated figures such as Claud Lovat Fraser, who played an important role in graphic design and theatre set design in the early 20th century, also held exhibitions of their work at the Mansard Gallery and designed the company's seminal posters, while its catalogues contained essays by influential art critics.
Exhibition of French Art
The gallery's most influential event took place in 1919, when noted critic and poet Sacheverell Sitwell organised the Exhibition of Modern French Art. This ground-breaking show, which introduced Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani to the British public, was widely praised by modernist critics such as Roger Fry who, upon seeing the show, commented ‘what innumerable different visions, one can enjoy in this gallery!’
Others were less impressed by the new style of painting on show, with one reviewer for the Times describing the works as 'ghastly'. Literary giant Evelyn Waugh was also not enamoured by Heal’s penchant for daring modern forms, later referring to such pieces in his 1939 short story Work Suspended as ‘those vague assemblages of picnic litter which used to cover the walls of the Mansard Gallery in the early twenties’.
Modern Tendencies
As the decade progressed, the Mansard Gallery increasingly served to showcase the latest developments in interior design with some of the new styles of furniture proving more controversial than the artworks.
From 1928, the ‘Modern Tendencies’ series of exhibitions continued to shock commentators by bringing tubular style furniture to the high-street and thus introducing Britain’s homeowners to the ‘moderne’ and Art Deco styles that were sweeping across the continent.
Unlike the art shows, these events tended to consist of fully-formed rooms in which the furnishings were carefully arranged to demonstrate how they could be laid out in the home. Complete with displays from the renowned florist Constance Spry, this novel approach to display was in no small part thanks to Heal’s resident interior designer, and mistress of Ambrose Heal, Prudence Maufe who later became head of the Mansard Gallery.
Hosting shows by notable British artists
Interspersed with exhibitions of contemporary furniture, fabrics and industrial design – the Mansard Gallery played a valuable role in creating the cultural landscape we enjoy today.
Heal’s are officially reopening the doors to the historic Mansard Gallery on Tuesday 15th February. The exhibition space will see a series of artists take residencies within Heal’s flagship Tottenham Court Road store on the 1st floor, offering a commercial platform for both established and emerging designers to sell their works to the public.
For more information, please visit /collections/the-mansard-gallery
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