Luke Hughes and Company Limited

Luke Hughes and Company Limited was incorporated as such in 1986, although Hughes himself had been working with wood in one form or another since sweeping up at the age of 12 in the workshop of master harpsichord maker Michael Johnson.[9] Taking a degree in architectural history from Cambridge University in 1978, he moved directly into working as a carpenter on building sites and set up a small workshop, trading as Bloomsbury Joinery, in London’s Covent Garden that year.[10] In 1981 he bought a former vegetable warehouse in the same district at a much reduced price because it was earmarked by the Greater London Council for compulsory purchase, demolition and redevelopment. (The Council was abolished[11] before the plans could be realized.)

In the early 1980s the workshop’s output consisted of high quality furniture for the residential market. Exposure to an increasing number of institutional clients came from a chance encounter with Colonel David Gordon-Lennox, commanding officer of the Grenadier Guards, whose own kitchen shelving led to a commission for the regiment’s archive library, and from there a series of bookcases for Inns of Court lawyers.[12] Many subsequent library commissions have included high-profile installations such as the library of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (2009).[13]

The mid-1980s also saw the company’s short-lived and ultimately ill-fated engagement with design for the retail market in the form of its robust but modestly priced ‘Ovolo’ range of bedroom furniture, 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,[14] appointed chairman of the limited company in 1990, and an architect whose own background included work on the Festival of Britain in 1951 and a long career, first as design director then managing director, of iconic Cotswold furniture manufacturer Gordon Russell.[15][16] Here is the substantive link to the Arts and Crafts movement[17] which is so important in the underlying philosophy of Luke Hughes and Company.

In 1990, the same year of Ray Leigh’s appointment and the opening of the Wiltshire factory, the company opened a showroom / studio in Drury Lane, Covent Garden, establishing its distinctive identity at a level to reassure corporate clients. 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.[18] 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 at the height of the ‘Cool Britannia’ years for the idiosyncratic new British Embassy in Moscow, designed by Ahrends Burton Koralek,[19][20][21] and in 1998 came the first order of over £500,000, for St Hugh's College Oxford. The late 90s also saw the development of meeting and conference room tables for the executive boardroom market,[22] culminating in two widely publicised corporate HQs for Unilever and Diageo.[23]

Since 2000 the company has concentrated on commissions for public buildings, a large proportion of them of either historic or architectural interest or both.

The ‘core proposition’ of the Luke Hughes brand is ‘Furniture in Architecture’.[24] Although the company had been working expressly on those lines since the early 1990s, it was in 2013 – with the help of Craig Allen, former creative director at Linley Furniture and a senior buyer at the Conran Shop – that its brand messages were rationalised.

The greater part of Luke Hughes & Company furniture is designed for existing or historic buildings. 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 its work. The pivotal idea behind Luke Hughes & Company’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.[25]

The company’s design practice is focused not only on responding to the aesthetic and functional qualities of the buildings that house its furniture, but also the economic outcomes. Analysis and re-arrangement of the leg positions on the tables in a dining hall such as New College Oxford[26] or an overhaul of the seating geometry in a small historic theatre[27] add capacity, improving the efficiency and profitability of the building. The company’s ranges of stackable and demountable benches,[28] chairs[29] and tables,[30] enhance an interior’s flexibility and adaptability and enable the client to generate revenue and sweat the building as an asset. The Arts and Crafts traditions of honesty to materials and construction, and respect for the dignity of the craftsperson working with his or her hands[31] suffuse the work of Luke Hughes & Company, but in a modernized and technologized version.[32] At scale, the precision achievable by a craftsperson at a ‘one-off’ level needs the most sophisticated digitally driven machinery. Hughes himself has lectured and written widely on this subject and the relevance of craft to modern industrial production;[33] he calls the British furniture industry ‘neither an industry nor a craft but a machine-assisted craft’.[34]

The company’s overriding use of timber as its predominant material – 65 per cent of its production,[35] – has driven both a scientific enquiry into its performance qualities in collaboration with the Cambridge University engineering department,[36] and developed its policy on principles of environmental responsibility.[37] The proposition is that the longer a building and its furniture stay relevant, the longer the carbon stays locked up, and the longer it stays locked up, the less CO2 emissions. Luke Hughes furniture is designed for long life, 30 – 50 years minimum. The strict company policy is to buy solid hardwoods from suppliers who derive their raw material from forests managed to the standards of FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification), SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) or equivalent, where replanting and controlled felling are part of the overall plan. Tree-planting schemes are actively supported and the company is a founder member of the Woodland Heritage Trust.[38] Timbers listed as endangered in the CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) are not used. Particle boards and veneers used come from forests in Western and Central Europe, United States and Canada and are 99 per cent recyclable by weight. All production meets E1 standard (EN13986) of ultra-flow formaldehyde emissions. Glue used to attach edges on tables is water-based and releases no VOCs. All steel products are manufactured from 100 per cent recycled scrap and are themselves 100 per cent recyclable.[39]

Books featuring Luke Hughes’s work:

• ‘Furniture in Architecture: The Work of Luke Hughes’ by Aidan Walker, Thames & Hudson 2020
• ‘London: Hidden Interiors’ by Philip Davies, English Heritage and Atlantic Publishing 2012
• ‘Pews, Benches and chairs’ edited by Trevor Cooper and Sarah Brown, Ecclesiological Society 2011
• ‘Keeping Somerset Churches Alive’ by Hugh Playfair, Spring 2010[91]
• ‘The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom’ edited by Chris Miele, Merrell 2010
• ‘Art Workers Guild: 125 years – Craftspeople at work today’ by Lara Platman, Unicorn Press 2009
• ‘Keble College, past and present’ by Averil Cameron, Merrell 2009
• ‘Classic chairs’ (introduction by Alan Powers), Luke Hughes and Company 2006
• ‘Country Houses Today’ by Jeremy Melvin, John Wiley & Sons 2006
• ‘British Embassy in Moscow’ by Jeremy Melvin, Foreign & Commonwealth Office 1999
• ‘Building for the future’ by Clare Stevens, St Barnabas, Dulwich 1997
• ‘The Technique of Furniture Making’ by Ernest Joyce, Batsford 1987