In 2014 I received a call from Wade Upholstery who had seen one of my chairs in an exhibition. They invited me up to their factory at Long Eaton for a look at what they were doing and to discuss some new designs. Long Eaton is an eye-opener; the whole town is full of upholstered furniture workshops. The first chair I designed for them was a 'show-wood' lounge chair; that is a wooden frame with upholstered seat and loose seat and back cushions. Wade have got everything under one roof, prototyping, frame-making, finishing, and upholstery. It's on a big scale but the element of hand craftwork is evident in every detail.
For the first chair I made a rough 1:5 scale model.











I find that quickly cutting out shapes in foam-board and glueing them together is a much better way of deciding on the form and proportions than anything done on the computer. The next stage was for Wade to make a full-size prototype, I had this back at the studio for a week and made lots of little amendments. These were approved, I drew up the design to scale and we then had the final design modelled in Solidworks. On my next visit I found a hundred frames were sitting in the factory ready for upholstery!











Here (below) is a finished chair, this one in oak with Melin Tregwynt upholstery.











I've now designed a few chairs for Wade, and for their sister company 'Cintique'. Another one that made it into producction is this contemporary rocker :











The first versions of both these chairs were originally available through John Lewis. Current versions are now marketed by Arlo & Jacob, another Long Eaton company whose London showroom is located in an old Victorian ice cream factory, just by Putney Bridge Underground Station.