Balzac 30

Beginnings

Having a conversation with Sheridan Coakley and Matthew Hilton about the beginnings of the Balzac armchair is a little like doing a jigsaw puzzle. We know what the final picture looks like; it’s a curvaceous club chair, usually seen in tan leather, that became something of a motif for SCP. Finding all the pieces to tell the story of how it was created, and more importantly, what the atmosphere was like at the time, is more tricky.

Sheridan explains. “The problem really is that it is thirty years ago. Okay, we weren’t that young, but we were young. We didn’t have the kind of backup people have now, where you have studios and assistants, and I would have a marketing team and a prototype department. Nothing was ever filed, we never made any notes, we just did stuff, and that is the difficulty trying to remember it, as there is no formal process that was ever written down.”

These days, it’s all a formal process, and it’s all written down. Every new SCP product is discussed at length, rendered, photographed from endless angles, corrected, perfected and made with future proofing in mind. Everything now is done very much on purpose, but whether things have any more purpose, is another debate entirely.

The two guys working out of a chicken shed were the founders of a small specialist upholstery company called Thetford Designs Ltd, who SCP would go on to work with for over a decade before eventually buying the company and incorporating into SCP in the mid 2000s. As the Blueprint article observed, at this time Sheridan was operating “much like a French or Spanish furniture “editor”, buying the services of small manufacturing companies as he needs them and using several suppliers to make elements of the same piece.”

The reality was, if you wanted to make contemporary furniture in Britain from around 1985 onwards, there were not many other ways in which you could do it. However, working with a small upholstery company, making things to order, allowed SCP to start the journey towards being an independent specialist manufacturer in its own right, and the Balzac, was the first product on that journey.

DR

Was the first Balzac in leather?

MH

I think we probably did it in that furry Divine fabric that everyone used to use.

SC

Divina Melange?

MH

Yes. I am pretty sure Sheridan said let’s try leather, and had found an aniline leather to suit.

SC

I saw this leather up at the factory, and asked them what it was for, and they said it’s for making Chesterfields and it’s unfinished. They used these untanned hides, so they can then stain them. If you look at those reproduction Chesterfields, they stain them in the folds black, so it looks old. When I saw this leather, this completely natural untreated hide, I instinctively felt that was exactly what the Balzac should have, and we have never changed it since then. We developed our own leather eventually. So the leather we use now is specially made for us (by Sorenson), but at the time we used this completely natural untreated hide.

SC

At the time, minimalism was the vogue, chairs and sofas being made were not being designed for comfort.

MH

There wasn’t a lot of comfortable modern furniture around. Modern furniture wasn’t that great for ergonomics.

SC

That was something we did at the time. We did talk about this being an English club armchair and all that goes with that, which is mainly to do with comfort. It’s kind of enveloping you. It went against the grain in that respect, as it wasn’t like anything being produced by the young designers around at the time. Everybody was designing much more non-functional forms.

MH

There was a very kind of Bauhausian sensibility at the time. Upholstery was quite hard and kind of fighting to not look soft. Everything was very geometric and proper.

DR

Two other cultural aspects that seem relevant to the Balzac are the fact it was introduced around the same time IKEA came to Britain (1987), with their famous “chuck out the chintz” advertising campaign, and that it then found success in the time of new Labour and the whole “Brit” movement, in design, art, fashion and music. These things seem to me have had an influence on the success of the Balzac as a cultural item.

SC

It was the first time that the public started to understand that modern furniture was acceptable and you didn’t have to have inherited vintage furniture.

MH

There was a whole shift in the early to mid 90s. It was when all the design magazines started. Blueprint had begun in the 80s, and then Elle Deco in the early 90s.

Article by Duncan Richies