Luke Hughes (furniture designer)


Luke Hughes is an English furniture designer and former maker, founder and CEO of Luke Hughes and Company Limited, whose designs can be found in many of Britain’s institutional buildings including Westminster Abbey, the two chapels in the Tower of London, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, 24 cathedrals, more than 100 parish churches, 60 of the 70 Oxford and Cambridge University Colleges, and a number of official professional headquarters such as the Royal Institute of British Architects and the General Medical Council. His work also extends to 900 corporate boardrooms, academies in China, universities and synagogues in the United States. He is an accomplished mountaineer and has explored unmapped areas of central Tibet. He is married to Polly Phipps who is joint CEO of his eponymous company. They have one daughter.

Early life

Hughes was born in London on 11 May 1957. His father Jan Nasmyth and mother Jenny Turner, married in 1949, came from the British professional and civil servant classes; his maternal great-grandfather Claud Schuster was Permanent Secretary to the Lord Chancellor’s Office from 1915-1945. His paternal grandmother, Dorothea Maude was a pioneering woman doctor who, in World War One, had defied the War Office to work in military hospitals across Belgium, Serbia and Greece. Maude claimed descent from two of Charles II’s mistresses, Nell Gwyn and Louise de Kérouaille.
Nasmyth, an economist and independent minded journalist who, after being wounded and evacuated at Dunkirk is credited with a role in the development of the British Army’s Small Scale Raiding Force, forerunner of the Special Boat Squadron, writing a paper on the philosophy of small-scale raiding parties which was later adopted by Special Operations Executive as the blueprint for such activities. Nasmyth went on to found the newsletter, Europ-Oil Prices and later Argus Media.
Jenny Turner was an influential and pioneering intellectual, one of the first women to be appointed to the diplomatic corps and later a journalist for The Economist and The Manchester Guardian and presenter for television current affairs programmes. She became personnel director of Macmillan Publishers in 1974.
Luke Hughes has a brother, Kim Nasmyth the molecular biologist and geneticist, and two sisters, Jessica, a former music agent, and Polly his half-sister, a distinguished violinist who died of a brain tumour in 1997.
Jan and Jenny’s marriage was annulled in 1960, and in 1961 she married Billy Hughes, a circuit judge and bibliophile with whom she set up home under the walls of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, in the dilapidated Wardour House which the couple restored to great effect. Hughes’s fascination with architecture and the building trades – especially carpentry - came from this part of his childhood, but he attributes his commitment to craftmanship to his time sweeping up in the workshop of renowned harpsichord maker Michael Johnson who shared space with José Romanillos, guitar maker to musician Julian Bream.
Hughes’ love of climbing, which he would practise on the walls of the castle itself, also comes from this time. There is a strong mountaineering tradition in his family background, five of his forebears being committed climbers in the 1860s and 70s, and Claud Schuster becoming President of the Alpine Club in the 1930s.
Hughes was educated at Salisbury Cathedral Choir School and St Paul’s School in London, and after a gap year spent as a midshipman and carpenter’s mate on the Blue Funnel cargo-liner MV Atreus in the South China Seas, in 1975 went up to Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge on an open history scholarship. He changed course from Mediaeval History to History of Architecture and dabbled with Oriental Studies. On coming down from Cambridge he took a two-year law conversion course at Bristol Polytechnic, supporting himself by restoring Morris Minor Travellers, the wood-framed estate version of Britain’s most popular post-war small family saloon.

Design and Craftsmanship

Hughes was temporarily working as a carpenter on London building sites in 1979 when a chance encounter with Lt Col David Gordon-Lennox, the commanding officer of the Grenadier Guards, led to a commission for kitchen shelving. From there came the task of refurbishment of the Guards’ archive library, the first library project in a long line which led through a series of bookcases for Inns of Court lawyers to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in 2009. It allowed Hughes to set up Bloomsbury Joinery in 1980 in the back yard of a small house in Lamb’s Conduit Street, Covent Garden, which he had bought with his brother and a friend. In 1981 the opportunity arose to purchase a small vegetable warehouse nearby in Stukeley Street, a throwback to the days when Covent Garden was London’s central distribution point for fruit and vegetables. The building was acquired at a much depressed price because it was the subject of a compulsory purchase order from the Greater London Council, which planned to redevelop the area. The Council was abolished in 1986 before the plans could be realized and Hughes found himself the freeholder of a premium property at a knockdown price in one of the most sought-after and exclusive districts of Central London. Luke Hughes and Company Limited was incorporated in the same year.
In the late 1980s the workshop’s output was mostly for residential clients. The same period also saw Hughes’ short-lived and ultimately ill-fated engagement with design for the retail market in the form of the robust but modestly priced ‘Ovolo’ range of bedroom furniture, originally manufactured by struggling Birmingham reproduction furniture company Juckes and sold through upmarket outlets such as Heal’s, Liberty’s and John Lewis. Venture capital was raised and significant investment made in a factory in Wiltshire which opened in 1990. Copyright infringement and the deep UK recession of the late 1980s, which forced the factory’s eventual closure in 1994, prompted a decision to target recession-proof clients with long-term needs to furnish their buildings of architectural quality – namely the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Much was owed in this strategic shift to Ray Leigh, appointed chairman of the limited company in 1990, and an architect who had become first the design director then managing director of iconic Cotswold furniture manufacturer Gordon Russell. Here is the substantive link to the Arts and Crafts movement which is so important in Hughes’ philosophy of design and manufacture.
In 1990 Hughes opened a showroom / studio in Drury Lane, Covent Garden. The first Oxbridge commission, of dining hall furniture for Corpus Christi College Cambridge, came in 1991, a job which also marked the company’s first use of computer-aided design. The first commission for the Foreign Office – the British Embassy in Buenos Aires – and the first order over £250,000, for Merton College Oxford, followed in 1992. 1997 saw a high-profile commission for the idiosyncratic new British Embassy in Moscow, designed by Ahrends Burton Koralek, and in 1998 came the first order of over £500,000, for St Hugh’s College Oxford. The late 1990s also saw the development of meeting and conference room tables for the executive boardroom market, culminating in two widely publicised corporate HQs for Unilever and Diageo.
By this time Hughes was writing and lecturing regularly for institutions such as the Royal Society of Arts and magazines such as Crafts and Woodworker. He sets himself apart from the contemporary generation of middle-class British furniture designers and makers by his entrepreneurship, but remains deeply committed to the Arts and Crafts movement design principles of the dignity of manual labour and honesty to materials and process. His lecture ‘Spokeshaves, Spanners, and Computers’, originally delivered to the Royal Society of Arts and published in Crafts magazine in 1999, was subsequently published in The Independent newspaper and has been re-published twice in Crafts. It sets out his vision for a vital craft-based industrial sector: ‘Modern artisans, building or craft, are as good as they have ever been. Only now they are better educated, work harder and are more financially acute than ever before. They have in their own workshops sophisticated industrial processes on a smaller, more economic scale than ever before. They understand the implications of technology and how to apply it and as a group of entrepreneurs, they have become an economic force of their own.’
The other element of Hughes’ design philosophy is his conviction that great architecture needs great furniture. Response to the architecture is key; an understanding of architecture and the design process, and sympathy for the architect who designed it, are central to the work. The pivotal idea infusing Hughes’s approach is that ‘in any quality building, the connection between architecture and furniture should be seamless, creating a sense of “rightness”, both functionally and aesthetically. Most buildings cannot function without the furniture, yet inappropriate furniture can grossly undermine great architecture.

Significant projects

Pieces for, among others: The Economist, London Review of Books, Royal Society of Arts Journal, The Ecclesiologist, Architects’ Journal, Crafts Magazine, Spectator, The Independent, Alpine Journal, Himalayan Journal; also substantial contributions to Encyclopaedia of Wood

Lectures

For, among others: the Royal Institute of British Architects, Royal College of Art, Royal Society of Arts, Institute of Wood Science, Crafts Council, Art Workers' Guild, Geffrye Museum, Cambridge Architecture Faculty, Christie’s, Alpine Club, Royal Scottish Geographical Society, Save the Children Fund and, specifically, on Sustainability and Design at international conferences in Amsterdam, Abu Dhabi, Auckland, Beijing, Shenzhen, Brisbane, Bangalore, Bombay, Brisbane, Dubai, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Singapore, Sydney etc.

Mountaineering

Expeditions include North face of The Eiger and to within 100m of the summit of Everest via the Hornbein Couloir: also pioneering expeditions to Tibet, Nepal, Kashmir, Greenland, Rockies, Alps, and Pyrenees. Hughes spent his 60th birthday at 6,500m on the border of Tibet and West Nepal.

Other

In 1988, Hughes was one of the main characters portrayed in ‘On The Big Hill’, Granada TV’s six-part documentary about Mt Everest.
Other character sketches appear in:
In 2016, Hughes was interviewed for ‘Crafts Lives’ by the British Library’s Oral History Collection: