Kenneth Grange, who has died aged 95, was the main British product designer of the second half of the Twentieth century. Even when unaware of his identify, most individuals in Britain are accustomed to his output: the Kenwood Chef meals mixer, the Kodak Instamatic digital camera, the Ronson Rio hairdryer, the Morphy Richards iron. These on a regular basis objects are a part of all our histories. Grange was additionally answerable for the restyling of the InterCity 125 high-speed practice and the 1997 TX1 model of the London taxi.
He was a tall, good-looking, ebullient man, a joker with that aspect of inside ethical objective typically discovered within the designers of his postwar era. He grew up imbued with a dedication to make the world a greater place visually, his emphasis at all times on useful effectivity. Grange was a grasp at reassessing utilization, however he additionally considered design by way of sheer enjoyment. He wished us to share within the shocking grace of the expertise because the 125 practice comes hurtling down the observe.
When he arrange his personal design consultancy in 1956, Grange was one in all only a handful of designers working on the planet of what have been then quaintly known as client items. A lot of his early commissions got here by way of the Council of Industrial Design (now the Design Council), a governmental physique arrange with the remit of bettering nationwide design requirements. Grange’s fee to design Britain’s first parking meter, the Venner, launched in 1958, got here by way of the council. So too did his introduction to Kenneth Wooden, proprietor of the agency in Woking whose home merchandise have been marketed as Kenwood. Grange’s clean-lined and user-friendly Kenwood Chef meals mixer grew to become a housewives’ standing image of its time.
Like his close to modern Vidal Sassoon, Grange got here from a non-artistic background and had a equally innate sense of visible fashion. Each males have been quintessentially Sixties skills, Sassoon together with his geometric haircuts, Grange with a succession of urbane fashionable merchandise for a brand new, self-consciously modern age. He grew to become a primary designer for the rising market in “transportable equipment”: pens for Parker, cigarette lighters for Ronson, the melamine and smoked perspex Milward Courier shaver which, in 1963, gained the Duke of Edinburgh’s prize for elegant design (now often known as the Prince Philip Designers prize). Did Prince Philip himself use it? Grange insisted that he did.
In 1972 Grange joined 4 of the rising stars of his career – Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Theo Crosby and Mervyn Kurlansky – in founding the ultra-modern design group Pentagram. This was a multidisciplinary consultancy described by Grange as “a one-stop store” offering specialist companies in graphic design and promoting, structure and – Grange’s personal space – product design.
Pentagram grew to become the bee’s knees of design consultancies: formidable, skilled, clever and jaunty. It attracted loyal purchasers, together with Reuters, for whom Grange designed the Reuters monitor, a state-of-the-art laptop terminal and keyboard, fantastically effectively engineered in heavy silver aluminium sheet.
By the 70s Grange was occupied with probably the most excessive profile of his design commissions: the aerodynamics, inside structure and exterior shaping of the nostril cone of British Rail’s Excessive Velocity Prepare (HST). The InterCity 125 was a key aspect in BR’s technique to woo passengers away from automobiles and planes and again on to the trains. Nonetheless the primary HST prototype they got here up with was, in Grange’s opinion, “a lumpish, brutish factor”.
He realised he may solely enhance the looks by first tackling the aerodynamics. On his personal initiative (and at his personal expense) he spent every week at night time working with a advisor engineer at Imperial Faculty London, the place there was a wind tunnel. In the middle of these experiments they developed numerous new concepts, eliminating the buffers, hiding the couplings within the underside of the nostril cone, and giving the practice a extra futuristic look.
It was launched in 1976 with its radical, dynamically angled nostril design. Grange was at all times cautious to provide credit score to the experience of the engineers he labored with. All the identical, it was his main triumph and an enduring image of the most effective of mid-Twentieth-century British design. The HST – nonetheless in use at the moment on chosen passenger companies after virtually 50 years – reworked the general public expertise of travelling by practice.
He was born in east London, the son of Hilda (nee Lengthy), a machinist, and Harry Grange, an East Finish policeman. Kenneth was introduced up in what he as soon as vividly described as “a bacon-and-eggs form of home”, respectably furnished with a three-piece suite and flowery curtains, the dominant color being brown. Nonetheless his dad and mom supported his chosen profession in what was then termed “business artwork”. Through the second world struggle, the household had moved to Wembley in north London, and Kenneth gained a scholarship to Willesden Faculty of Artwork and Crafts the place, from the age of 14, he studied drawing and lettering.
These primary abilities gave him the entree to a succession of architects’ places of work: Arcon; Bronek Katz and R Vaughan; Gordon and Ursula Bowyer; and, from 1952, the remarkably versatile architect and industrial designer Jack Howe – all of those have been modernists and prime movers within the postwar marketing campaign to rebuild Britain utilizing newly accessible supplies and methods.
Grange took half within the 1951 Pageant of Britain, working alongside Gordon and Ursula Bowyer on the Sports activities Pavilion for the South Financial institution exhibition. For therefore lots of Grange’s era of designers – together with Sir Terence Conran and my husband, David Mellor – the pageant could be an enduring inspiration. As Grange later recollected: “You couldn’t stroll a step with out seeing one thing unlikely – the cigar-shaped Skylon, the large Dome of Discovery, extraordinary steel sculptures, waterfalls that twisted and turned. Nothing was like something I had ever seen earlier than.”
The place a lot of British design was nonetheless craft-based, dominated by concepts that went again to William Morris, Grange felt the fascination of machine manufacturing. He was excited by the glossy designs primarily based on new expertise starting to infiltrate Britain from the US, describing the moulded plastic Eames chair for instance as “a rocket ship exploding into our slender world”. I bear in mind being impressed on my first go to to his home in Hampstead, north London, to search out him the possessor of not only one Eames lounge chair however three.
Grange’s pure resilience stood him in good stead by way of the 70s and 80s, these lean years for designers when British manufacturing misplaced its approach and, as he described it, “unbridled accountancy grew to become the brand new dynamic in British trade”. He was glad of international purchasers, particularly having fun with working in Japan the place the innate Japanese consciousness of design delighted him. An particularly profitable fee was a stitching machine designed for the Maruzen Stitching Machine Co in Osaka, to be marketed in Europe. On journeys to Japan he began what grew to become a substantial assortment of lovely wood geisha combs.
Pentagram itself was flourishing, shifting in 1984 from Paddington to bigger and extra fashionable premises in a renovated dairy in Notting Hill. At this era it employed greater than 80 designers and assistants in numerous disciplines, and the communal eating room grew to become an ever-welcoming speaking store, a gathering level for London’s design world of the time. I bear in mind some marvellous events at Pentagram, together with the celebration of Grange’s marriage in 1984 to Apryl Swift.
For Grange himself the Nineteen Eighties introduced rising public recognition. In 1983 a solo exhibition of his work was held on the Boilerhouse on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
At this level he was already being lauded as Britain’s most profitable product designer. He was made CBE in 1984, and knighted in 2013. In 1985 he obtained an honorary doctorate from the Royal Faculty of Artwork and in 1986 grew to become grasp of the elite group of Royal Designers for Business. Success by no means spoilt him. He had a streak of self-denigrating humour and retained a form of boyish innocence, as if he may hardly consider his good luck.
The sheer problem of the job had at all times been his driving drive. After his retirement from Pentagram in 1997, after 25 years as a companion, he and Apryl launched into a venture of their very own, changing an historical stone-built barn within the distant countryside close to Coryton in Devon right into a spectacular fashionable dwelling with a spiral staircase of extremely ingenious modular development. Completion took 5 years; Grange commuted weekly between London and Devon, travelling on his acquainted Excessive Velocity Prepare.
In 2011 the Design Museum held a retrospective, Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Fashionable. He continued to design into his 80s. Late commissions included the right males’s shirt for the style designer Margaret Howell; an up to date vary of basic lights – the Sort 3, Sort 75 and, in his ninetieth 12 months, the Sort 80 – for Anglepoise, for whom he had been made design director in 2003; and a extremely snug assortment of chairs for aged folks. Common ranges of design for the aged inhabitants made him offended. “The place is the first rate modernist care dwelling?” he would ask.
Typical of Grange’s zany 60s humour was his design of a man-shaped timber bookcase that transformed to a coffin, the final word train in recycling. “If I ever pop my clogs, it’s books out and me in, with the lid mounted, as much as the good consumer within the sky.”
Two earlier marriages led to divorce. Apryl survives him.
Kenneth Henry Grange, designer, born 17 July 1929; died 21 July 2024
