British style icons: David Mellor Design

Period Living looks at the life and work of ‘the king of cutlery’, and how David Mellor Design has become an icon of British style.

ABOVE (left-right): David Mellor; The interior of David Mellor’s Cutlery Factory, The Round Building, showing the unique ‘bicycle wheel’ structure of the roof; Corin Mellor.

Tucked away on a leafy bend in one of the most beautiful areas of Derbyshire, the David Mellor Cutlery Factory and Design Museum sit on the foundations of an old gasworks. It is here that the legacy of one of Britain’s finest metalworkers and flatware designers is now continued by his son, Corin Mellor.

Born in Sheffield in 1930, David Mellor, the son of a toolmaker, grew up in one of the more affluent areas of the working-class steel town. His success as a designer has always been inextricably linked to Sheffield, a city of production, and his childhood was full of ‘making things’.

At school, he wasn’t particularly interested in any subject other than art, and at the age of 12 moved to the junior department at Sheffield School of Art, where he was trained in metalwork by William E Bennet, a pupil of the famous silversmith Omar Ramsden.

Even at a young age he displayed intuitiveness with materials and respect for craftsmanship, and his first pieces carried the stripped-back simplicity and practical integrity that today marks David Mellor as a luminary of post-war design. His mature work was characterised by pieces that are as classic as they are daring, and as elegant as they are practical.

Mellor cultivated his distinct style – something Terence Conran has called ‘plain, simple and useful modernity’ – through his time at the Royal College of Art and trips to Scandinavia and Italy. In 1960 he moved his small silversmiths workshop and industrial design consultancy from inner Sheffield to a suburb.

ABOVE (left-right): Embassy cutlery, originally commissioned for use in the British Embassies; Black Granite Pestle & Mortar, designed by Corin; Pride Soup Spoon, designed by David in 1953.

David Mellor worked and lived at Broom Hall – with his wife, design journalist Fiona MacCarthy, and two young children, Corin and Clare. ‘Growing up in Broom Hall was a wonderful experience,’ says Corin. ‘One wing of the Victorian building was the house we lived in, then you went through the cleaning cupboard and found the next wing that had all the machines in it. It was quite bizarre, but as a child you don’t really question it.’

It is now very much a family business; Corin took over as creative director in 2006. Clare, a graphic designer, works for the company, Fiona writes everything and Corin’s wife, the photographer Helen Mellor, is responsible for the product images. ‘Even my six-year-old son has inherited this second nature for making things,’ says Corin. ‘He spends part of most weekends in the factory hammering things.’

David Mellor is most famous for cutlery, which has influenced British tables in every section of society for over 50 years. From the iconic 1970s Chinese range, coveted by design fanatics, with its bold ivory handles and broad, flat stainless steel blades to the pared-back stainless steel sets used in hospitals, prisons and government canteens, his designs always reflect his identity as an instinctive Modernist.

He was commissioned to design the tableware for 10 Downing Street during John Major’s premiership, and produced a sterling silver set of Modernist simplicity, with a hint of Georgian style in the knife handles made of dark green malachite (royal blue lapis lazuli had been rejected in the fear that it might have been seen to favour the Conservatives). The commission, however, was never produced as David received a letter saying that the pieces were not decorative enough. ‘They wanted something much more elaborate,’ says Corin. ‘So my father wrote back and said, “well, I’m not the person to do the job,” and that was the end of it.’ The design was then adapted into the English cutlery range, and the originals can be seen at the museum.

Forever testing the relationship between classic shapes and minimalist design, David Mellor was the first to reduce the 11-piece dining set down to five. ‘I like to think of myself as the person who finally abolished the fish knife and fork,’ he noted. This experimentation was taken to the extreme with the 1970s Minimal range, his most aesthetically radical design. With no obvious curve or sculptural element, each piece seems to be a single strip of stainless steel. ‘This collection is only really popular with people as fascinated with design as my father,’ says Corin.

ABOVE (left-right): The spacious library and office area in a building adjacent to the Cutlery Factory; The Round Building, designed by family friend Sir Michael Hopkins, has won numerous awards; Cutlery blanks in production in the factory.

The company’s talents expand far beyond the dining room table. From the traffic lights on every road that blend seamlessly, almost unnoticed, into the street scene, to a 40ft bridge designed by Corin that will be impressively strung between two buildings at Sheffield Hallam University, David Mellor Design proves itself to be as versatile as it is precise.

It was during an after-university trip to Rome that David decided to permanently alter the street furniture of Britain. ‘In comparison to what he saw in Italy, England’s streets were so uninspiring,’ says Corin. A young David, fresh out of art school, was determined to correct what he felt was aesthetically wrong.

He travelled around England showing manufacturers his sketches of lamp posts, something which would probably be unheard of today. Most of them declined his offer, except for Abacus, a firm in Derby, which agreed to manufacture his designs, which then went on to line many major roads across the country. ‘Designing street furniture now is so restrictive – everything has to be a certain height and shape,’ says Corin. ‘I think my father had a lot more fun. He had the complete freedom – and wilfulness – to reshape the British city.’

The local grit-stone and leaded Round Building, designed by Michael Hopkins and built on the circular foundations of a gas cylinder, is where all the David Mellor cutlery is produced. The factory, museum, café and shop moved here in the early 1990s, and although just a few miles from Sheffield, this peaceful spot in the Peak District National Park could be a million miles away.

There are eight workers who carefully forge, roll, mould, cut, perfect, polish and inspect each implement, not to mention a calligrapher who has handwritten each label for years. ‘I don’t know what we’ll do when she retires,’ says Corin. Everything here is made in small batches, and each item is meticulously crafted as an individual piece of art. ‘We are dedicated to making things,’ says Corin. ‘That’s what we do.’

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FEATURE KATIE GIBBONS; PHOTOGRAPHS ©DAVID MELLOR LTD
Featured in the February 2012 issue of Period Living