Episode 3: Design Legacy

In this episode, you'll have the opportunity to eavesdrop on a candid conversation between Paula Day, the Founder of the Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation, and Corin Mellor, the Creative Director at David Mellor. Together, they share their experiences as custodians of their parents' iconic designs. Meeting for the first time, Paula and Corin delve into their distinct journeys growing up with designers as parents and how they each ensure the preservation of the pioneering designs created by Robin and Lucienne Day, and David Mellor. Moreover, they explore strategies for heritage brands to maintain their relevance in a competitive retail market.

Paula Day

Paula Day is the only child of furniture designer, Robin Day and textiles designer, Lucienne Day, both pioneers of modern design for over 7 decades and two of my personal design heroes. They each deserve design hero status primarily because they designed with a core aim to improve people’s lives through the designs they bought for their homes but also because they were each independently fearless in their approach to new materials, forms and techniques.

Paula is a writer, poet and garden designer with a Cambridge degree and a doctorate in English Literature.

I have had the pleasure to hear Paula speak many times about her parent’s work which is part of her role as founder of the Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation, a design education charity launched in 2012.

Public speaking is something Paula does regularly alongside events and exhibitions, two notable events must be Robin Day Works in Wood, an exhibition in 2015 at the V&A Museum which celebrated the centenary of Robin’s birth, and two years later to celebrate the centenary of Lucienne’s birth, the Arts University Bournemouth exhibition Lucienne Day: Living Design.

robinandluciennedayfoundation.org

Corin Mellor

Corin Mellor is the son of David Mellor, one of Britain’s best known cutlery designers with an expertise in ‘good design which will endure’ including his iconic traffic light and bus shelter designs.

Corin’s mother, Fiona MacCarthy, was an extremely well regarded biographer and cultural historian whose own interest in design permeated her work with publications including Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus, William Morris: A Life for our Time and All Things Bright and Beautiful: British Design 1830 to Today.

I must share here that I was born in Sheffield, the steel city, and grew up learning about my city’s heritage in steel and cutlery. It’s perhaps not surprising that I have always felt drawn to David’s ‘good, everyday design’, and that he was the person I chose to interview back in 2001 for my BA. It was an honour to meet him and to tour his Hathersage factory together, just a stones throw away from where we sit for this recording.

Corin studied Product Design at Kingston University before working for a London based architect. He joined his farther in the family business and took the lead in 2002 when his father retired.

Corin has followed his father’s design ethos, which was perhaps inevitable as he says, ‘work and life have always happened in the same space.’

davidmellordesign.com

Presented and produced by Alys Bryan, filmed and edited by Daniel Budda.

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