Beyond Parnham: Liberty and Harrods furniture designer John Makepeace celebrates 40 years of world-famous design college

Furniture designer John Makepeace fell in love with wood as a small boy. Constantly whittling away at scraps, he signed up to carpentry classes aged six and often called in at the cricket bat factory near his home in Solihull in the West Midlands.

“I went to a fine-furniture workshop with my mother when I was 11,” says Makepeace, 78. And his future was sealed. The name Makepeace is now synonymous with Parnham College, the pioneering, highly influential and globally acknowledged furniture making school that he set up in Dorset 40 years ago.

Aware of Scandinavia’s furniture making prowess, Makepeace toured it to study the work of such great Danish designers as Hans Wegner and Arne Jacobsen. “I appreciated its humanity and their special cabinet making skills,” he recalls.

Back home, he was apprenticed to Dorset cabinet maker Keith Cooper, who told him he would never be a success, Makepeace cheerfully reveals. “But I have a strong rebellious streak that took that as a challenge.” He then enrolled on an Edinburgh-based business correspondence course that covered design history. He taught craft and drawing skills in a secondary modern school in Birmingham and then took off on a tour of the US.

In 1963 he converted farm buildings in Banbury, Oxfordshire into his home and first workshop, and in the mid-Sixties he won an Observer kitchen design competition prize of £600, which funded a trip to Africa.

“As an unknown it was tough finding customers.” But his idea of creating a range of commercial products manufactured in small batches proved successful, selling well at Heal’s, Liberty and Harrods. This included a scarlet-stained wood-and-glass coffee table stocked by Habitat that was a huge hit.

His success gave him the chance to return to and develop his individual expressive, handcrafted wooden pieces. He landed a commission in the Sixties to kit out 120 rooms at Keble College, Oxford with bespoke beds, chairs and wardrobes.

In the Seventies he co-founded the Crafts Council, the national agency to promote British designer-makers, and was commissioned to make a dining table to celebrate Liberty’s centenary in 1975. The resulting Arthurian-looking, limed-oak piece with a base shaped like branches reflected his taste for natural forms.

The Victoria & Albert Museum acquired his 1978 birch ply, acrylic and stainless steel storage unit with drawers that cleverly swivel on a pivot. Famous Makepeace designs include his Eighties Sylvan chairs in oak and leather with backrests shaped like writhing trees, and his idiosyncratic Nineties Trine chairs fashioned from yew, bog oak, stainless steel and epoxy, each with a different backrest.

Passionate to educate, Makepeace has led initiatives with the V&A to encourage adventurous design with speakers such as Amanda Levete and Thomas Heatherwick.

Early students at Parnham College in Beaminster included David Linley and Sean Sutcliffe, co-founder with Terence Conran of furniture maker Benchmark. Opened in 1977 and based in Parnham House, an 80-room Tudor manor in 14 stunning acres, the college “bridged learning furniture making with business management”, says Makepeace.

“We offered an intensive two-year residential course. There was a continuous flow of diverse expertise from visiting tutors, including Royal College of Art lecturers and manufacturers of recycled plastic.”

The college encouraged a strong work ethic with down time, including loud parties in the Tudor cellars. Students left as craftspeople with business and PR skills, too, profiled at prestigious end-of-term shows at Sotheby’s and the National Theatre.

A central plank of Parnham’s philosophy was sustainability: “We used widely available indigenous woods — ash, sycamore and oak.” Makepeace researched sustainable forestry after buying nearby Hooke Park, a 350-acre forest. “This provided the trees to build a new campus there, designed by architects such as Frei Otto and Ahrends Burton and Koralek, and engineering consultancy BuroHappold,” he says. “The early buildings construction was led by John Bunford.”

Makepeace received an OBE in 1988 for services to furniture design. The American Furniture Society’s award of distinction and the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers’ first lifetime achievement award followed.

In 2001 he sold the college and it moved to Hooke Park. Soon after, it amalgamated with London’s Architectural Association, which now owns the college. Having got his life back, Makepeace and his wife Jennie, with whom he has two sons involved in woodlands and timber buildings, bought their new home, Farrs, a 1730s house in Beaminster that was in desperate need of renovation. Still a prolific designer, Makepeace was last year commissioned to create seven ceremonial chairs for Plymouth University.

Marking Parnham’s 40th anniversary, a limited-edition book, Beyond Parnham, about its history and alumni, launched last night at the Design Museum in Kensington.

Former Parnham student Steuart Padwick has designed nursery furniture for Princess Charlotte and Prince George. Andrea Stemmer, co-founder with Sarah Kay of Kay + Stemmer which created SCP’s Agnes shelving, attended Parnham in the Eighties, as did Konstantin Grcic, now an industrial designer with Cassina, Driade and Flos as clients.

Isabelle Moore and Jake Phipps were Parnham students in the Nineties. Phipps collaborated on the bowler hat-shaped Jeeves & Wooster lights for Innermost. Moore created her Maple task chair.

Makepeace says what strikes him most about Parnham’s alumni is their independent, individualistic, spirit. Of course, it echoes his own.