Devon chair and Design Guild Mark

The development of this chair had its beginnings in an event put on in 2011 by Carl Clerkin, William Warren, and myself, which we called The Great Windsor Chair Race. This took place at the Contemporary Craft Festival in Devon - hence the name of the chair. The 'race' was an ad hoc demonstration of experimental Windsor chair making, to see who could make the most, or the most interesting chair during the three-day event. (William won - on quantity of course.)

One of my pieces was this chair. My idea was to make a wide, low, comfortable chair, suitable for relaxing rather than dining, but generally of the Windsor type - that is - a chair whose legs and back spindles fit securely into a solid seat. As we didn't have a steam bender on site the back bow was laminated from thin strips, and to save time on shaping the seat I made it, then cut into three, angled the edges, and glued it back together again to create a slightly hollowed form.

The chair was then in production for a number of years until the Covid lockdown, when, finding everything at a sudden halt, I began making them myself in my own workshop, This marked a change from batch production to more of a hand-crafted approach and currently the Devon chair is available from The New Craftsman Gallery in St Ives, Messums Wiltshire, and Contemporary Applied Arts, London.
And also from my online shop of course.

This design has been awarded a Design Guild Mark by the The Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers, and was shown at COLLECT2023 at Somerset House.