Online Talk 25th Sep 2026, 6pm.
Robin and Lucienne Day were pioneers of modern design in postwar Britain. For over six decades they pursued independent careers alongside each other, he mainly in furniture design, she mostly in textiles. Leaders in their respective fields, their distinct design legacies retain a freshness and vitality which still stimulates and inspires today.
Robin (b. 1915) grew up in the furniture making town of High Wycombe and studied at the Royal College of Art in London. He met Lucienne (b.1917), daughter of a Belgian businessman and an Englishwoman with a passion for interior decoration, at an RCA dance in 1940. The outbreak of World War II limited their opportunities, but in the immediate postwar period Robin built up a practise in exhibition and graphic design, while Lucienne designed dress fabrics. Winning (with Clive Latimer) the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1948 Low-Cost Furniture Competition brought Robin international recognition. Their career breakthrough came with the Festival of Britain in 1951; Robin was commissioned to design radical moulded plywood furniture for the new Royal Festival Hall, as well as room displays for which Lucienne created the boldly contemporary textile design Calyx. This was the start of their most important client relationships, he with British furniture company Hille, she with Heal Fabrics.
Their design careers spanned the rest of the 20th century and beyond. Robin produced a huge body of product and furniture design; the world’s first Polypropylene chair (1963) transformed the international furniture industry and epitomised his lifelong mission to provide good affordable design which could improve the quality of everyone’s lives. Lucienne created a stream of work not only in furnishing fabrics but also in wallpapers, carpets, ceramics and other media. In the mid-1970s she devised a new textile art medium and her ‘silk mosaics’ were widely commissioned and exibited.
After they died in 2010, their daughter Paula Day set up the Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation, a charity dedicated to maintaining and communicating their legacies. As the hub of information and resources about the Days, the Foundation has developed a comprehensive digital archive and collaborates with design writers, broadcasters and museum curators. It also licenses their designs to leading companies for authentic reissue and distribution worldwide.
In this richly illustrated talk, Paula Day will explain the challenges and rewards of working with her parents’ legacies and bringing their designs back into production, always balancing the commercial reality of current materials, technology and market requirements with a profound respect for the original designs.
This talk is organised by the Friends of the Gordon Russell Design Museum, and profits will help to support the continuing work of the Museum.
www.gordonrusselldesignmuseum.org
What’s on at the GRDM www.gordonrusselldesignmuseum.org/online-events/
Image credits
1. Paula Day in 2015 with reissues of 1952 Reclining Chair and 1954 dress fabric. Credit twentytwentyone.
2. Robin Day in studio with Q-stak (1953). © Robin & Lucienne Day Foundation/photo: Air Ministry.
3. Lucienne Day with Calyx (1951). © Robin & Lucienne Day Foundation/photo: Studio Briggs.
4. Robin and Lucienne Day in their studio at Cheyne Walk, 1953. © Robin & Lucienne Day Foundation.
5. Robin and Lucienne Day in their kitchen at Cheyne Walk, 1953. © Robin & Lucienne Day Foundation.
6. Robin Day with Polypropylene Chair shells in Botswana, 1980s. © Robin & Lucienne Day Foundation.
7. Lucienne Day with Aspects of the Sun silk mosaic, 1990. © Robin & Lucienne Day Foundation