Interwar and Art Deco: the club sofa, chrome, latex and the front-room suite

In brief. Between the wars the British sofa dropped its height, rounded its arms and moved into the suburban front room as one third of a three-piece suite, usually bought on hire purchase. Two new materials arrived underneath the cover — chrome-plated tubular steel for the frame, from 1925, and latex foam for the cushion, developed by Dunlop in the same decade — while leathercloth and moquette replaced hide and velvet for the mass market. The period ended with the government taking control of furniture altogether: the Utility scheme of 1942–52, whose plain, standardised easy chairs were the last word of the interwar years.

Art Deco named

1925The Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs

Tubular steel chair

1925–26Marcel Breuer’s B3 at the Bauhaus; PEL follows in Britain, 1931

Latex foam cushioning

InterwarDeveloped by Dunlop, sold under the Dunlopillo name

Hire purchase

1938Some five million families paying for furniture by instalments

Utility furniture

1942–52Board of Trade scheme; CC41 mark; Gordon Russell’s panel

What did a sofa look like after the First World War?

The sofa of the 1920s was lower, deeper and rounder than anything the Edwardians had sat on. The upright stuffed-over seat of 1900 gave way to the club shape: a squat frame, arms rolled into a fat cylinder or squared into a slab, a back that curved into the arms without a break, and loose seat cushions on a sprung platform. The name came from the gentleman’s club, but the form was made for a smaller room than any club possessed. A typical survivor in the Museum of the Home is an armchair of 1930–40 by the Buoyant Patent Upholstery Company of Nottingham, one of a three-piece suite, with rounded arms and back, castors, and a cotton cover in an abstract pattern of greens, brown and beige; the maker’s labels are still fixed to its base. It is not a grand object, and that is why it matters: it is what most people bought.

Above the suite trade stood the reforming shops. Heal & Son of Tottenham Court Road, under Ambrose Heal — chairman from 1913, knighted in 1933 — sold well-made furniture in plain woods; the V&A’s Heal armchair of 1928–29 is limed oak with a leather seat, made as the companion to a desk. Below it came industrial substitutes that looked like craft. W. Lusty & Sons bought the rights in 1921 to the American Lloyd Loom method of weaving twisted paper fibre, and their model 464 armchair of November 1930, black with gold and a stepped pattern on the back, shows a production-line material borrowing the Moderne look; the V&A notes that Lloyd Loom replaced wicker, which was dearer and less durable, and was made in vast quantities into the 1960s.

What was Art Deco, and how did it reach British sofas?

Art Deco takes its name from the Paris exhibition of 1925, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes; the V&A describes the style as running from the boom of the 1920s to the bust of the 1930s, drawing on old traditions while celebrating the modern, mechanised world. In France it was a luxury art — Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann called his richest work his “precious pieces”, in exotic woods, ivory and sharkskin. In Britain it was quieter and more commercial, and in upholstery it meant a low horizontal line, a stepped or curved silhouette, and pale plain covers set off by strong accent colours.

Three names carried it into the London drawing room. Betty Joel, born in Hong Kong in 1896, began designing for her own house after arriving in England in 1918, built a factory at Hayling Island under the “Token” name and moved production to Portsmouth in 1929, keeping a Knightsbridge house as showroom. The V&A holds a suite she made in 1929 for a Harley Street consulting room in Queensland silky oak, and sums up her manner as the rich materials and clean lines of French Art Deco joined to the functionalism and craftsmanship of the Arts and Crafts movement. Syrie Maugham ran a decorating shop from 1922, opening in Grosvenor Square in 1924, and became famous for rooms in shades of white — mirrors, antiques and modern fabrics against white finishes; her mirrored screen of 1935 in the V&A was made for her own house. Waring & Gillow, whose Oxford Street emporium had opened in 1906, staged an interior-decoration exhibition of Frank Brangwyn’s designs in 1930, went into receivership in 1931 and was refloated the next year — a reminder that the style arrived with the slump.

The country-house version survives at Coleton Fishacre in Devon, finished in 1926 for Rupert and Dorothy D’Oyly Carte to Oswald Milne’s design, with pale rooms, strong accent colours and a saloon carpet by Marion Dorn. The popular version was the cinema. The Odeon at Sutton Coldfield, built 1935–36 by J. Cecil Clavering of Harry Weedon’s office, is listed by Historic England as the first purpose-built Odeon in the mature house style, with low curved balustrades in the foyer and “go-faster” streamlined mouldings; Oscar Deutsch spent on the exterior and kept the interior simple. The curved, banded, upholstered look people came to call “Odeon style” was learnt in those foyers and taken home.

When did tubular steel furniture arrive in Britain?

Tubular steel furniture was invented at the Bauhaus in 1925–26 and reached British production in 1931. Marcel Breuer, master of the Bauhaus furniture workshop from 1925, took the idea from his bicycle frame; his club chair, model B3, is nickel-plated steel tube with strips of cotton canvas stretched for seat, back and arms — a club armchair reduced to its outline. The V&A holds one made in 1927–28 and calls it the first tubular steel chair and, for many, the most important piece of furniture of the twentieth century; it adds that although the chair stood for mass production, most examples were hand-built in small numbers. Mart Stam’s cantilever of 1926 removed the back legs altogether.

Why did plywood follow steel?

British taste cooled on chrome almost as soon as it warmed to it, and bent plywood took its place in the progressive home. The V&A’s account of Breuer’s Long Chair of 1936, made by Isokon, says the move to plywood suited a British modernism that preferred the soft curves and warm appearance of wood to the harsher look of metal. Isokon, founded by Jack Pritchard, is described by the museum as probably the most forward-thinking British furniture maker of the 1930s; the Long Chair evolved from Breuer’s aluminium chair of 1932–33 under the influence of Alvar Aalto, its seat sent from Estonia and fixed to a London-made frame, priced at over six pounds, with upholstery to the buyer’s choice. Gerald Summers’s armchair of 1934, made by his firm Makers of Simple Furniture, went further: one sheet of thirteen-ply birch, cut with four straight lines, glued and pressed in a wooden mould for eight hours, with no bracing at all. About 120 were made before the company closed in 1940 for want of materials. None of these is a sofa, but together they set the low, cantilevered, cushion-on-a-frame idea that the upholstered sofa would absorb after 1945.

What were 1930s sofas stuffed with?

For most of the period, the answer was still horsehair and coil springs — but their replacements were born here. The 1920s suite seat was a coil-sprung platform, the springs lashed to webbing and covered in hessian, with hair or fibre stitched over and a top cover tacked to the frame; the loose cushions on better suites were spring interiors in ticking, a miniature mattress. Rubberised hair — curled hair bonded with latex into a sheet that kept its loft without stitching — offered a quicker, more even pad. Then the rubber came without the hair.

Springs changed too, though the change is harder to document from museum objects. The trade adopted tension springs — long, close-coiled steel springs stretched horizontally across the seat frame and clipped at each end — to give a resilient base a fraction of the depth of a coil-sprung platform, which is what let the seat sit so low; and unit springing, coils pre-assembled on wire frames, could be dropped into a seat as a single component. Gordon Russell’s Utility working drawings of 1943–52 in the V&A include diagrams of spring-unit components, which shows the unit was standard by the war. The zigzag “no-sag” spring that carries most modern sofas belongs to the same family, but we have found no dated British object to fix its arrival and treat it as post-war in practice.

Who bought the three-piece suite, and how?

The three-piece suite was bought by the new suburban owner-occupier, and mostly on credit. Historic England’s guide to suburban housing names the forces behind the interwar building boom — an expanding middle class, the increasing availability of mortgages and the political promotion of home-ownership — and the speculative semi with gables, bay windows and so-called half-timbering that resulted. Its front room was for display, used on Sundays and for visitors, and the suite of settee and two armchairs, matched in cover and shape, was its centrepiece: bought as a set, delivered as a set and paid for weekly.

The scale is recorded in Parliament. Introducing the Hire-Purchase Bill to the Lords on 2 June 1938, Lord Amulree said that something like five million families held hire-purchase agreements for furniture alone, that about sixty per cent of British furniture was sold this way, and that the trade ran to roughly £100 million a year. The Bill — steered through the Commons by Ellen Wilkinson, the Member for Jarrow — was aimed at the “snatch-back”, the repossession of goods after almost the whole price had been paid; the debate cited a charwoman who lost all her furniture having paid all but twenty-five shillings. The Act passed that year. It is the first time the sofa appears in British law as an object of consumer protection, and it tells you who was buying: not the client of Betty Joel, but the family in the semi.

Materials: what went where, and why

Leather or fabric?

For the first time the honest answer was neither — or rather, imitations of both. Leathercloth, sold under trade names of which Rexine is the best known, was a cotton fabric coated with nitrocellulose, embossed and coloured to pass for hide; the Science Museum Group describes it as made by ICI’s Leathercloth Division at Hyde in Cheshire and commonly used as an upholstery substitute, durable and easy to clean. It gave the suite trade a “leather” suite at a fabric price, and went on doing so through the war: the Museum of the Home’s Utility dining chairs of 1943–48 have drop-in seats in brown Rexine. Moquette did the same job for velvet. A woven wool pile, its name from the French for carpet, it could be cut for a velvet nap or left uncut in loops for a hard, dirt-hiding surface; the London Transport Museum records that the first London pattern, Lozenge, was woven in 1923 by Firth Furnishings and reflected the Art Deco home furnishing of the day, and that in the 1930s Frank Pick commissioned Enid Marx, Marion Dorn and Paul Nash to replace florals with geometry. The suite in uncut moquette and the bus seat were cut from the same cloth. Real hide stayed at the top of the range, real velvet in the decorator’s white room; below them, for the first time, most people sat on a manufactured surface designed to look like something else.

Coda: what was Utility furniture, 1942–52?

Utility furniture was the government-controlled furniture of the Second World War and after: a fixed range of approved designs, made by licensed firms from specified materials and sold at controlled prices. The V&A records that the Board of Trade set up the scheme in 1941 to ration the production and consumption of furniture, with strict specifications for the dimensions and materials of every piece; timber was one of the scarcest materials, and furniture therefore one of the most tightly controlled classes of goods. The Museum of the Home adds the reasons — demand from people bombed out of their homes, the need to save materials, and the loss of skilled labour to the forces and munitions. Each piece carried the CC41 mark; the museum’s Chiltern-range dining chair of October 1942, designed by Edwin Clinch and Herbert Cutler and made by Moss Partners of Enfield, is stamped with it, and another, from High Wycombe, carries its maker’s licence number, CC41 460.

What survives in a sofa made today

The low line, the rounded arm and the moulded cushion all date from these two decades, and so does buying seating as a set. The comparisons below pair each with a piece made in England today; they show the lineage, not a reproduction.