The Windsor chair is an archetype of traditional English furniture-making, with its roots in the 17th century. The designer Michael Marriott has described himself as a strict modernist. And never the twain shall meet? Not according to the creative director of the Conran Shop, Polly Dickens, who recently commissioned Marriott to design a modern version of the Windsor. Earlier this year she paired him up with a family-run company in Hereford called Fauld, which specialises in reproduction English and French furniture. "Michael was an obvious choice for this project," she explained. "He's got such an exceptional body of work and his designs focus on function. I thought he'd make a great partnership with the craftsmen at Fauld, who have such a heritage of making functional furniture."
The collaboration is part of a selling exhibition that Dickens has put together to complement a new book by Terence Conran. Inspiration is a picture-packed tome filled with things that have inspired and informed Conran's life and work - from robots to peas. From this wildly varying selection, Dickens has chosen 12 pieces and commissioned designers to create new examples of them. What Dickens did not know was that Marriott already had a strong affinity with this particular style of chair. His father was a Fulham Road antiques dealer and he grew up in a home filled with Windsor chairs. Marriott loves them. But rather than being driven by nostalgia, his relationship with the chair is tied up with his preoccupation with design history and modernist philosophy. "Windsor chairs are one of the true precursors of the movement. What I think is amazing is that they were being made on what was essentially an assembly line in the late 1600s - before the Industrial Revolution." He goes on to weave a tale of Keynesian economics, steam wood bending and division of labour that would convince anyone that the Windsor chair is one of mankind's most significant developments. His enthusiasm is contagious.
Marriott's image of the Windsor chair as neglected hero is one that could be applied to the designer himself. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1993 (he now teaches there), Marriott has worked steadily as a product and furniture designer, lecturer (his recent talk at London's ICA on design and technology included his musings on the Windsor) and exhibition designer. And although he has produced work for British manufacturers including Inflate, SCP and more recently Modus and Established & Sons, his name remains one that is more familiar to industry insiders than the consumer, and major European manufacturers have yet to discover him. Somehow, Marriott, the winner of the first Jerwood prize for furniture in 1999, has worked largely below the parapet for most of his career.
"What I do is quite raw and utilitarian. Much design today is fashion and ego-led, so that makes me an outsider," he offers. "But maybe it has something to do with my mindset. Most people don't care about the things that concern me. I spend most of my waking and a lot of my sleeping hours thinking about the junction between two components." Marriott is not a bells and whistles designer, but his focus on detail gives his work a distinct flavour.
It is this attention to detail - and an admirable amount of restraint - that Marriott brought to the Windsor chair project. Rather than opting for the radical redesign of a chair he already has such high regard for, Marriott produced a piece that was "recontextualised for the 21st century". He scoured Fauld's vast catalogue of work, which includes a dozen different varieties of the Windsor chair alone, and was drawn to one in particular: the humbly named Irish Primitive.
"It was quite crude really," Marriott explains. "The legs are clunky and clumsy. And the square seat makes it unusual, so it wasn't a classic Windsor to begin with." What he did was "tidy it up" with a handful of technical and aesthetic alterations. He removed unnecessary details such as fake joints added to the reproduction piece. A nut and washer was replaced by a more modern stainless-steel dome-headed nut to secure the iron struts to the frame. He changed the order of undulation on the original turned wood legs, which alternated between thin and thick. In the original the stretchers (horizontal supports) slotted into the thinner sections; now they fit into the wider parts, thus creating a more secure joint. It is an almost imperceptible change, but one that was obvious to Marriott.
Some of the more noticeable alterations must have mystified Fauld. "But they were so easy to work with and so accommodating," Marriott insists. "There was no sucking their teeth when I made requests." Most of Fauld's furniture is coloured in a spectrum of shades, from limed ash to dark oak. Instead, Marriott had the ash/elm painted white or simply treated with a clear varnish. Then he asked that the feet be dipped into bright red paint - a touch that is as close to a flourish as Marriott really gets. Finally, to acknowledge the locale of production it was called the Hereford. "It's a chair that doesn't have an ego," he says.
The Hereford chair, £995 (Dh6,540), is part of Inspiration at the Conran Shop, 81 Fulham Road, London SW3 (0044 20 7589 7401) to October 23. Terence Conran's Inspiration (Conran Octopus) is out now.
© David Nicholls / The Daily Telegraph / 2008