Paul O’Leary

FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR DEVOL KITCHENS

Paul graduated from Loughborough University in 1987 and co-founded Insight Design Consultancy, which had a strong ergonomic bias and won commissions from The M.O.D, The Royal National Hospital Bath and Cranfield Business College. In 1989 Paul followed his yearning for design and production with one of the design partners, Philip deVries and co-founded deVOL. With design offices and showrooms at the beautiful Cotes Mill, an historic water mill dating back 1000 years, deVOL has been a renowned design led furniture manufacturer for almost 30 years. deVOL began specialising in freestanding kitchen furniture in 1993.

How would you describe your work/design style/ethos? Our products are of a time and we hope they will always be timeless. Our followers and customers love the nostalgic feeling that our furniture and accessories stir within them. Our furniture is classic and simple, it has a sense of place and time and it sits comfortably in houses that were built in the last 200 years. It’s reminiscent of our childhoods and our memories of our parents and grandparents’ homes. Except we don’t do an avocado bathroom suite!

How long have you worked in this sector? I set up in business before I even graduated 32 years ago. In fact, I missed my graduation ceremony, £40 for a hat and robe and 4 hours in a sweltering marquis, seemed like a good party to miss.

What led you to this career path? I tried a few other things and struggled; A Design Consultancy (didn’t know how to find customers); Restoring Classic Cars (my welding is ropey and I thought if you cleaned everything in an engine and put it back together, it would work); Stripping Doors (messy old game), Restoring Antique Furniture (loved it and learnt about traditional cabinet making and developed a sense of detail and proportion). And then one day a customer walked in and asked me to make a sink cabinet; I visited their house and sketched something up and they took “a leap of faith” (their words).

Please describe the project you are most proud of to date, with reasons why this was a success? I always think we could do better as soon as it’s complete. It’s the lot of a designer; you are super critical and never satisfied, so you never think something is perfect and, because your goal is to achieve just that, you will always feel like you’ve failed. So, for me, it’ll have to be something that very few people could achieve. I’m proud of our Haberdasher’s range, it was a bold move, tough to make, nobody else has even attempted it. No-one can call us fakers. I also invented flatulence filtering underwear; I’ll dine out on that for the rest of my life! What inspires you? The fortitude of people who are disadvantage by disability and those who live with a terminal disease. In the face of injustice and adversity, the human spirit can’t help but push against it. People who are humble and driven at the same time.

What motivates you? My dear old Dad gave me a simple piece of advice: “Be good at what you do”. It’s that simple.

Where and how do you find support? Graduates, lots of them; they are talented and raring to go. I have an army of them being amazing every day. I feed off their enthusiasm to impress.

Please tell us your aims for the next twelve months and beyond. To calm down and try and calm everyone else down too. We’re all traumatised and uptight, with good reason. The economy is going to be harsh, there will be a shift in the labour market. The labour market has to reset every ten years; it’s like the Matrix. Everyone gets full of themselves and expects the world to deliver on their expectations, and they need a reality check.

What would be your key piece of advice for emerging designers right now? Sketch, for heaven’s sake sketch, and make stuff yourself. And put your sketch books under the table at your degree show. Everyone’s renders and digitally printed prototypes are all perfect, so you can’t go on that any more. Two pages of a sketch book tells me if you have the gift.