&Tradition introduces Robin Day

16 July 2024

In 1948, following the end of the Second World War, the Museum of Modern Art in New York launched a design competition entitled “International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design”. The name of the competition is a perfect synthesis of the times: the economy is in strong recovery, bourgeois homes are looking for their own style, functional and in clear break with the past. Companies are aiming for a new type of furniture that is easy to produce on a large scale, accessible and useful.

The designers are entrusted with the epochal task of planning the formal and substantial revolution of the house having a wealth of tradition to manage in the best possible way by choosing what to keep and what to abandon. It is the dawn of modernity in which companies and designers understand the richness of the productive tradition but also the need to update it to bring it into a completely new world and way of life.

The project of the British designer Robin Day and his partner Clive Latimer for a containment system fits into this scenario: this project wins the MOMA competition for its category, projecting his career into the international Olympus of designers.

Raised within the British design tradition in which the weight of history and aristocratic homes cannot fail to be felt, Day preserves English pragmatism but frees furniture from frills and sumptuousness to embrace a futuristic concept of design at the time.

Making its two fundamental values: always designing something that is more useful and better than what came before it and using the least amount of material possible. Robin Day understands the importance of production efficiency in an era in which there is still no talk of sustainability, and this intuition translates into an aesthetic characterized by minimalist elegance and lightness.

His furnishings, despite being fully functional, seem to float in the space, merging with it and its elements in a completely natural way.

An excellent example of his approach is the Royal Festival Hall, for which he was commissioned to design all the furnishings in 1951 on the occasion of the Festival of Britain, a celebration of renewal, optimism and post-war hope.

Paula Day, Robin Day’s daughter, talks about this great project in an interview with &Tradition: “If you look at the drawings and the architecture, they express a sort of lightness, festivity, fantasy, celebration. I think my father’s designs embodied that. They have a sort of bird-like quality, a sense of levitation. None of his later works have the same playfulness.”

Visual lightness, beauty, functionality are the characteristics that we find in the Robin Day collection that &Tradition has decided to relaunch, continuing its path of reconstructing modern design. And here in the RFH Collection some of the furnishings designed for the Royal Festival Hall come to life again: the RFH armchair; the RFH lounge chair, and the RFH Terrace table and RFH Terrace chair.

&Tradition also puts another very successful series from Robin Day’s career back into production: the Hillestak collection, produced in the 1950s by the British company Hille with which the designer had a long and fruitful collaboration. The collection is now called Daystack and consists of the Daystack desk; of the Daystack table and the Daystack Sidechair.

Furnishings designed by Robin Day primarily for his home and then translated into his own democratic language, which features wood, compact proportions and the honesty of design of elements for authentic homes.

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