Robin Day, OBE, RDI, FCSD (25 May 1915 – 9 November 2010)[1] was one of the most significant British furniture designers of the 20th century, enjoying a long career spanning seven decades.

On leaving the RCA in 1938, there were no suitable openings in the furniture industry, so he made architectural models and took a teaching post at Beckenham School of Art, where he developed a ground-breaking course in 3D design.

[1] After the Second World War, Robin Day taught interior design at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster), where he met the architect Peter Moro (1911-1998).

Day continued designing exhibitions and trade stands until the early 1960s for clients such as the radio manufacturer EKCO and the industrial giant ICI.

Their ingenious concept for a range of multi-purpose storage units fabricated from a tube of pre-formed moulded plywood received international acclaim.

Supported on tubular aluminium legs, the cabinets were compact and flexible, with sliding doors, interchangeable shelf and drawer fittings and a writing desk with a drop-down flap.

[4] Day's success in the MOMA competition brought him to the attention of Rosamind Julius and her husband of the S. Hille & Co., a small London furniture firm keen to branch out into modern design.

[5] The brief for the Royal Festival Hall project was complex and demanding, including restaurant and foyer furniture, auditorium seating and orchestra chairs, each with specific functional requirements.

[6] The chairs he designed for the restaurant and foyer had sculptural moulded plywood seats with wing-like armrests and spindly black steel rod legs.

Architects were particularly enthusiastic about his furniture as it was ideally suited to the clean-lined, glass-walled modern buildings that were coming into fashion after the war, not only in the domestic sphere but in the public and commercial domain.

Robin Day began designing for S. Hille & Co. – a small cabinet-making firm specialising mainly in high-quality reproduction furniture – in 1949.

His Reclining Chair (1952), for example, had a slim angular upholstered seat, floating wooden armrests and U-shaped steel rod legs.

His Single Convertible Bed Settee (1957), with its lightweight foam cushions and simple swing-down wooden seat back, characterised the elegant flexibility of his designs.

Day later created a range of lightweight polypropylene shell chairs for schools called Series E (1971), produced in five different sizes with an oval hole in the back.

Designed for outdoors as well as inside, the Polo Chair was widely used for stadium seating, a specialist field in which Day became increasingly involved.

This massive project, which occupied him throughout the 1970s, included auditorium seating for the theatre, concert hall and three cinemas, as well as café tables and chairs and long snaking sofas for the foyers.

[13] Although Robin and Lucienne Day shared a studio, they mainly worked in their own spheres, apart from two occasions when they collaborated as joint design consultants to the John Lewis Partnership and BOAC.

[15] One of their main achievements at JLP was helping to develop a comprehensive new house style, covering everything from in-store signage and product packaging to company stationery and liveries for vans.

These reissues triggered wider interest in Day's post-war designs and prompted commissions from several other firms, including SCP, twentywentyone and the Italian company Magis.

[6] Day's democratic ideals and social purpose were reiterated by Fiona MacCarthy: 'His great aim was to make good design available all over the world, at prices affordable to ordinary people....

'No one would pretend that material, technical needs and function were the sole dictates of form, but it is evident that in some of the finest furniture of our time, technology on the one hand and superlative craftsmanship on the other, have played a major role.

[21] Ten years later their careers were examined in depth in a comprehensive retrospective exhibition called Robin and Lucienne Day: Pioneers of Contemporary Design at the Barbican Centre, London in 2001.

[25] These books, based on extensive archive research and interviews with the designers, provide the primary source of information about Robin and Lucienne Day's careers.