COLLECTING GUIDE Gerald Summers For a decade, until the firm’s closing in 1940, Simple Furniture produced more than 200 designs, including chairs, chests, cupboards, desks, sideboards, tables, and wardrobes. Conceived, in Gerald’s words, as “furniture for the concrete age,” these pieces helped shape the notion of the modern interior in Britain.
Forgotten genius Gerald’s work was largely forgotten until the 1970s, when historians of British design began to reassess the interwar years. Scholars focused on the remarkable bent plywood armchair. Its fluid organic form and one-piece moulded plywood construction rivaled the contemporaneous work of the great Finnish designer Alvar Aalto and presaged the revolutionary molded plywood chairs of the mid-century American designers Charles and Ray Eames
Engineering mindset
Summers’ time
Compared to his fellow modernists, the name of British designer Gerald Summers is known to few. But a recent sale and upcoming book is set to change all that
M
ore than 90 years have passed since the British designer Gerald Summers — creator of the iconic bent plywood armchair — and his partner, Marjorie Butcher, opened their London shop, Makers of Simple Furniture, in 1931. The firm’s earnest proprietors saw themselves as outsiders, but their mission to create simple, functional furniture responsive to the requirements of the modern home placed them squarely in the vanguard.
Above Gerald Summers
(1899-1967) for Makers of Simple Furniture, a plywood armchair, c. 1933-1934, estimated to make £7,000-£9,000, sold for £25,500 in 2022. All images courtesy of Lyon & Turnbull
European modernism
Right Gerald Summers
While Britain’s modernists debated how to translate “the house-is-a-machine-for-living-in” ethos of European modernism into a style suited to the British temperament, Gerald and Marjorie forged ahead. In doing so, they trusted in his rational approach to design—the emphasis on function, materials, and methods of manufacture— that he had absorbed as a young engineer’s apprentice during WWI.
(1899-1967) for Makers of Simple Furniture, a “Type P” chair, estimated to make £12,000-£18,000 it sold for £22,680. In its heydey it was advertised as “Suitable for occasional or dining use. Constructed of birch and finished in clear polish.”
30 ANTIQUE COLLECTING
Although Gerald is now known for other pieces, such as the elegant high back chair and serpentine trolley, the extent of his contribution to 20th-century design has received scant attention, and he has been perceived, wrongly, as an outlier. He was, in fact, tailor-made to be a modernist. His engineering mindset, which regarded purpose as the prime determinant of form, perfectly aligned him with Britain’s progressive designers, who rallied under the banner of “fitness for purpose.” What set Gerald apart was the rigour with which he applied this philosophy to his furniture. “A thing had to do a job,” Marjorie said, “and so he designed it to do the job it was meant to do.” Gerald held his counterparts to the same standards and often found their work to be wanting. In his published reviews of British furniture, he chastised designers who paid lip service to the modernist credo while designing for appearance rather than functionality.