Made With Love: Iconic Design Duos

Mid-century design was often a collaborative effort, with a series of couples making iconic furniture & decorative arts for modern homes...

By Estella Shardlow on Wednesday 1st February, 2012

Robin and Lucienne Day
Robin Day (1915-2010) and his wife Lucienne (1917-2010) were the power couple of post-war British design, making their mark together at the hugely influential 1951 Festival of Britain. Each had their niche area of design – he as a furniture maker, she in textile design – that slotted together to create harmonious interiors for the modern household. They deployed their shared ethos in the socially transformative power of design by creating furnishings for manufacturers like Hille, Liberty and Heals.
The pair met at a Royal College of Art dance in 1940, where she was a textiles student and he an interior design alumnus. They married two years later. Their shared passion for design was magnetic, and they spurred each other on to work with astonishing productivity and innovation through the 50s and 60s.
Decorating the House and Gardens Pavilion at the Festival was a turning point for the couple, bringing them international recognition. The brief was to create one low-cost and one high-cost room, both equipped with his latest storage furniture and chairs. Lucienne’s arresting abstract-patterned textiles and wallpapers were displayed alongside Robin’s steel and plywood furniture.
Comparisons with their US contemporaries, Charles and Ray Eames, came easily at the time, as they continue to do today, yet the couples’ working practices differed significantly. Whereas the Eames designed as a team, the Days mostly worked independently in separate fields and can be appreciated as towering figures in their own right.
Day’s functional, low-cost chairs, tables, desks and storage units harnessed the latest wood and metalworking techniques. These were spare, lightweight object that suited the smaller rooms of modern apartments and pre-fabs far better than bulky, ornate Edwardian styles. Meanwhile, Lucienne’s bold, repetitive patterns in acid or earth shades covered carpets, wallpapers, tea towels, table linen and ceramics brought to interiors the brightness and gaiety craved in dreary post-war Britain. Inspired by modern abstract art, such as that of Joan Miró and Paul Klee, her many textile commissions included wallpaper for Rasch, ceramics for Rosenthal and carpets for Tomkinson, Wilton Royal and Steele’s. In 2003 she told the Scotsman newspaper: "I was very interested in modern painting although I didn’t want to be a painter. I put my inspiration from painting into my textiles, partly, because I suppose I was very practical. I still am. I wanted the work I was doing to be seen by people and be used by people.” Evidently Lucienne shared her husband’s evangelical zeal for making functional, affordable, useful design accessible to all – ‘art for art’s sake’ couldn’t be further from their working philosophy.
Working side-by-side in the same London design studio, each excelled in their independent fields and simultaneously forged a complete aesthetic for post-war households.

Charles and Ray Eames
The best known of the 20th century design duos, Charles and Ray Eames’ design legacy includes children's toys, puzzles, films and buildings as well as of course iconic furniture like the 1956 Lounge Chair and LCW plywood lounge chair.
In 1941, the newly-weds moved into a modest Richard Neutra-designed apartment in a Los Angeles suburb and promptly turned the spare bedroom into a workshop. They kitted it out with a homemade moulding machine and Charles would sneak home glue and wood from his day job as a set architect at MGM studios. From this they created a leg splint for which the US Army subsequently placed an order of 5,000. The Eameses were on their way. This ingenuity and innovation would characterise their collaborative practice for the next 40 years.
Both Charles and Berenice Alexandra ‘Ray’ were the youngest of two children in middle-class families who showed a talent for art at a young age. The pair met while preparing drawings and models for the Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Charles had married a fellow student from Washington University, Catherine Woermann, in 1929, but he divorced her in 1941 and set off on a Californian road trip honeymoon with Ray.
Charles and Ray shared a belief in the philanthropic beauty of everyday objects, which is evident in the organic aesthetic and love of materials that defines their furniture. Herman Miller, the US furniture group, put their furniture into production on a mass scale, having identified the relevance of such democratic and technically innovative design to America’s growing middle class. Later they established long-lasting relationships with European manufacturers Vitra and IBM, for which they made films and designed exhibitions.
Although early catalogues often listed just Charles’ name, it is widely accepted that the two were equally involved in the design process. In addition, Ray was responsible for many of the Eames fabrics and the Time Life Stools.
Work remained the centre of their lives right up until Charles’ death in 1978, with working days typically running from 9am to 10pm and a full-time cook supplying meals to their studio. Ray then devoted her time to completing any unfinished projects, but never took on any more of her own, and passed away almost exactly ten years after her husband.

Vivika and Otto Heino
The Heinos stand together as a symbol of the mid-century California studio crafts movement. American-born Vivika (1910-1995) and Otto (1915-2009) began making their distinctive glazed pottery in the early 50s and continued to collaborate until Vivika’s death, always jointly signing their pots ‘Vivika + Otto’ regardless of who made it.
Blending Scandinavian modernism and Japanese folk pottery, their robust, wheel-thrown stonewares were finished with beautiful glazes in glossy cobalt blues, ruby red and sandy earth tones. These gutsy, utilitarian ceramics, often bearing the potters’ fingerprints, struck a chord with contemporary audiences.
Twentieth Century Fox commissioned them to create 751 pieces of pottery for the film, The Egyptian (1954) and they participated in over 200 national and international exhibits in their lifetime – a sign of just how popular and collectible their ceramics were. What’s more, Otto received the Diplôme D’ Honeur from the International Academy of Ceramics, Cannes in 1955, while Vivika was honored as Trustee Emeritus for the American Crafts Council in New York in 1991.
Still, the Heinos certainly saw themselves as craftspeople rather than artists and were proud to describe themselves as ‘potters’, influenced by the Arts & Crafts movement and Germany’s Bauhaus. One of their most celebrated creations was reformulating a lost-to-the-ages yellow Chinese glaze – a true labour of love, it took the couple over a decade to develop.
Following Otto’s death, Christy Johnson, of the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, paid tribute to the mutual inspiration they gained from one another: “Their devotion to the work, to each other, and to teaching contributed to the fine quality of the work.”

Luisa and Ico Parisi
Together with Gio Ponti and Carlo Di Carli, Ico and Luisa Parisi were instrumental in shaping post-war Italian furniture.
The couple in fact met through their passion for modern design. Luisa was a follower of ‘Alta Quota’, the architectural group that Ico co-founded in the early 40s, and she became his pupil.
After their marriage Ico and Luisa jointly participated in many exhibitions and interior design projects, including the state library in Milan (1947). Together they founded the design studio ‘La Ruota’ in 1947, in which they designed scores of Italian furniture for brands like Cassina, Cappellini and Stildomus, as well as creating ceramics, glasses and jewellery. Indeed, Ico in particular was attracted to the concept of the ‘Renaissance man’, a master of all forms of art and humanities – thus their practice spanned architecture, industrial design, painting and photography. Their signature (and most collected) designs are quintessentially modernist furniture from the 50s: elegant yet functional pieces exhibiting streamlined forms and the beautiful grains of teak, walnut or rosewood as materials.