14 ★ FTWeekend 19 October/20 October 2019
House Home
S
ir Kenneth Grange, Britain’s
most prominent industrial
designer, s busy andi ener-
getic despite turning 90this
year. He has just unveiled the
newly designed Type 80 lighting for
Anglepoise, featuring a gap halfway up
the shade so that it is bathed in an ambi-
ent halo while still casting a focused
beam.The range includes wall and pen-
dant lights — as well as the archetypal
Anglepoise desklamp, whose ingenious
mechanism remains, says Grange, “a
minormiracleoffunction”.
But there is far more to Grange than
lighting.Heis hebrainsbehindmanyoft
Britain’s most iconic, life-enhancing
postwardesigns,fromthelabour-saving
1960 Kenwood Chef food processor and
futuristic InterCity 125 high-speed train
of 1975 to London’s black cabs, which he
redesigned in 1997. Over the years, he
created Kodak cameras, Wilkinson
Sword razors, Parker pens, Morphy
Richards irons and Adshel bus shelters.
Grange isknown for modernising exist-
ing designs, rendering them sleeker
and, crucially, more user-friendly —
such as his 1996 redesign of Royal Mail’s
rural postboxes to accommodate larger
envelopes. His services to design earned
him a knighthood in 2013, among
countlessotherawards.
He has been design director of Angle-
poise since 2003, and steward of the
innovative spring-loaded desklamp
that is largely unchanged since itsinvention by automative engineer
GeorgeCarwardinein1934.
Anglepoise was groundbreaking in
the 1930s and continued tobe rede-
signed until the 1970s, but it had
been coasting since the 1980s. New
owner Simon Terry hired Grange to
refresh this utilitarian (albeitretro)
design to reach a younger audience.
Since then, Grange hasaugmented
its range and his designs now account
for 46 per cent of its portfolio.As
well as contributing his own iterations
of the light, he has injectedglamour
into the brand by enlisting fashion
designers Sir Paul Smith and Margaret
Howell — the latter a fervent fan of
mid-century modernism — to giveInteriors Britain’s most|
prominent industrial
designer sheds light on his
approach to modernity,
writesDominic Lutyens
A man
of poise
(Above) the
InterCity 125;
(right) the
Kenwood Chef
food mixer
(1960); (below
left) Kodak’s
Instamatic
cameras; (below
right) the rural
post box (1996)Sir Kenneth
Grange
Jake Curtis for AnglepoiseOCTOBER 19 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 16/10/2019- 17:44 User:elizabeth.robinson Page Name:RES14, Part,Page,Edition:RES, 14, 1