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Robin Day

1915 High Wycombe



Robin Day attended art college in High Wycombe between 1930 and 1933 and then received a scholarship to study from 1934 to 1938 at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1948 Robin Day and his wife, the textile designer Lucienne Day, opened a design studio. Robin Day was active as an industrial designer and exhibition designer but above all as a furniture designer.
In 1948 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a competition for designing low-cost furniture, as the title shows, an "International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design". Robin Day and Clive Latimer won a first prize with a plywood storage system they designed together. The prestigious New York design competition made Hille International, furniture makers, aware of Robin Day and in 1949 he designed his first furniture for Hille.
In 1950 Robin Day shared in developing the Hille corporate image and in subsequent years he was the top designer at Hille. In 1950 Robin Day designed "Hillestak", a simple, reasonably priced chair with a beechwood fram and seat and back of molded laminated wood with walnut veneer. To furnish the Royal Festival Hall in London Robin Day designed a simple armchair in 1951. In 1962-63 Robin Day designed "Polyprop", a stackable chair inspired by the Charles and Ray Eames "Plastic Shell" chairs.
For the seat, Robin Day used polypropylene, a new material at the time and the substructure was of bent steel tubing. Manufactured by the injection blow molding process, the plastic was inexpensive, light, and very durable. Moreover, the plastic could be stained in all colors. With this chair Robin Day hit on a very reasonably priced chair, so successful that it has been a long-term bestseller.


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