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At his house in Devon, Sir Kenneth Grange had a moulded plywood set of shelves in the shape of a human body. The bookcase was unusual in that it was intended to double eventually as Grange’s coffin. It was also one of his few designs that was not simultaneously in millions of other people’s homes.
Grange, who has died aged 95, was the most prolific and consistently inventive British product designer of the past 100 years, both inspired and inspiring to the generations that followed.
He was born in east London on July 17 1929. His father, a policeman, and mother, a machinist, encouraged his aptitudes for sketching and model making. In the late 1940s he won a scholarship to study commercial drawing and served an apprenticeship at London architects Arcon, where he encountered modernist design. His first product commission, the inverted teardrop-shaped parking meter designed in 1958 for Venner, became part of Britain’s streetscape. It helped him win more contracts at a time when manufacturers were crying out for designers to satisfy exploding demand for consumer goods.
Some early clients became his best; he compared them to Renaissance patrons. Among these was FHG Pitt, Kodak’s development director, for whom he designed the Instamatic camera, and Kenneth Wood, founder of kitchen appliances maker Kenwood. The sculptural good looks of Grange’s 1960 Kenwood Chef mixer made it an immediate success.
He later lamented his decision to take a fixed fee for the mixer instead of the royalty Wood offered. But he took pleasure in the success of companies whose fortunes he helped transform, including Parker, for whom he breathed new life into the fountain pen with the sleek, drawn steel Parker 25 model.
In 1967 Grange made the cut, along with Mary Quant, Twiggy and the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, for The Young Meteors, Jonathan Aitken’s survey of the motive forces of “swinging London”.
At the start of the 1970s, graphic designers Colin Forbes and Alan Fletcher and architect Theo Crosby had landed a project for BP that included revamping its petrol stations. Lacking a product designer, they approached Grange to design the petrol pumps. The group worked well together and, with Mervyn Kurlansky, became joint founders of Pentagram. The partnership grew into one of the best-known, then biggest, multidisciplinary practices in the world, described in the FT as the “Rolls-Royce of design”. (Pentagram would eventually be contracted to update the car marque’s Spirit of Ecstasy emblem.)
Grange stayed with Pentagram until 1998. By then, his reputation made him the obvious choice to refresh British totems such as the red post box and the London black taxi. His version of the latter, the TX1, was popular with cabbies because of its improved ergonomics, but retained many features they valued in previous models.
This ability to clarify and enhance an object while keeping the essence of a much-loved product also showed in his work for Anglepoise. His Type 3 and Type 75 models tweaked the usability of the articulated lamp and refined the styling for a new generation, without obscuring the engineering ingenuity of the 1934 original.
Style never trumped functional substance; one flowed from the other. He arrived at the InterCity 125 train’s wedge nose with the aid of wind tunnel tests. The locomotive, marketed by British Rail as the “journey shrinker”, set a world speed record in 1987.
He was married three times: in 1952 to Assunta Santella; in 1971 to Philippa Algeo; and in 1984 to Apryl Swift, who survives him.
Across his work for more than 120 clients, from loudspeakers for Bowers & Wilkins to oil cans for Halfords, the common thread in his work is that the products satisfy the eye and the hand. His tubular electric razor for Henry Milward in 1960 is on a par with Dieter Rams’s lauded shaver designs for Braun. The Apple designer Sir Jonathan Ive has written about “a sense of rightness — an inevitability” in Grange’s designs.
He was awarded multiple honorary doctorates, including one from the Royal College of Art where he was a visiting professor. The V&A and London Design Museum put on shows of his work and he was knighted for services to design in 2013. About his achievements, he combined a winning modesty with justifiable pride. He said of the InterCity 125: “If I stand on the platform at Exeter and in comes my train, my little chest puffs up and I feel pretty good.” His enthusiasm for engineering never flagged. In a video interview recorded months before his death, he extolled the virtues of the humble spring.
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