Britain has never been entirely clear about how to understand what it is that designers do. Are they offering a service, or is design a form of cultural self-expression? Gerard Taylor, who has died aged 70, always believed that it can be both.
The Scot learned this early on in his career, when in 1981 the great Italian designer Ettore Sottsass invited him to join his Memphis collective, not long after Taylor had graduated from the Royal College of Art in London. A kind of anti-Bloomsbury group based in Milan, Memphis turned the conventional idea of good taste upside down with a series of deliberately transgressive collections of furniture, glassware and domestic electronics, using cheap materials such as plastic laminate and a vibrant colour palette. The self-initiated work that Taylor did for Memphis, as well as under his own name in those days, such as his sculptural ceramics or, later, with Daniel Weil, the Quasimodo chair, which looked like the physical realisation of a cafe chair in a Cubist painting, are in museum collections now, or sought after at auction.
But Taylor also enjoyed working for clients, designing beautifully crafted shops for the Esprit brand that had little in common with the conventions of mass-market fashion at the time. He would later be responsible for the architecture of half a dozen of Habitat’s most interesting stores when it was run by Vittorio Radice. When Radice moved to Selfridges, Taylor worked there too, and later for the Irish fashion designer Orla Kiely.
Taylor’s sketchbooks, overflowing with pencil drawings and analytical watercolours, reflect the commitment that he put into all his work whether they were personal projects or not. “I believe that a designer should never work for their client, they have to work for themselves,” he told one interviewer. “They have to serve their client, they have to be rigorous and professional, [but] your vision has to go way beyond what the client is asking for. You always have to be pushing yourself to do what you think is interesting.”
Taylor’s longest-lasting client was Orangebox, an innovative manufacturer of office furniture that began as a start up in the Glamorgan village of Hengoed. In the 20 years that Taylor was the creative director, helping to shape its products, Orangebox grew into a worldwide business, employing 400 people, and successful enough to be acquired by the American giant Steelcase. “We weren’t selling chairs, we were selling stories,” Taylor said.
At the time of his death Taylor was working on an exhibition at the Modern Institute gallery in Glasgow, planned for next year. According to Taylor’s brother-in-law, the artist and author Edmund de Waal, it will include both early furniture designs and more recent sculptural work that explores the relationship between colour and space.
Born in Bellshill, a former mining town in Glasgow’s Lanarkshire hinterland, Gerard was one of six children of Mary and Michael Taylor, a buyer for the industrial manufacturer Honeywell who in latter years bought a sub-post office.
After St Saviour’s secondary school in Glasgow, Gerard considered studying art at Glasgow School of Art, but instead chose product design, where, following graduation, one of his tutors encouraged him to apply to the RCA for a master’s. He spent his summers working on set designs at the BBC, including for the Two Ronnies, and used some of his earnings to go to New York to see the painter Agnes Martin installing a museum show of her work.
When he graduated in 1981, design in London had momentarily become neither service nor art, but big business. Based on the profits that they made rebranding state-owned industries such as British Airways and British Telecom as they were prepared for privatisation, design consultancies were being floated on the stock market. It was not a version of design that appealed to Taylor. He was determined to work for Sottsass, Memphis’s founder, and the designer of beautiful machines for Olivetti, the Apple of its day.
Taylor, who described himself as a “ballsy Scotsman”, had heard Sottsass speak in London while at college, and met him again in his final year. After showing him his portfolio of sophisticated drawings, and projects that ranged from a stage set for Timon of Athens to a hi-fi system, Sottsass invited Taylor to Milan to work in Sottsass Associati, the new design studio he was setting up. Taylor became a partner for five years (1982-87), then set up a studio in London with Weil, a fellow RCA graduate. Their partnership was dissolved in 1992 and Taylor subsequently practised on his own.
Having begun his career early enough to take part in Memphis, Taylor worked long enough to see the practice of design utterly transformed by the digital explosion.
Four decades ago it was still possible for a designer to shape technology, as well as convey how it worked. “Usually [the product] comes in bland boxes that are a hopelessly inadequate reflection of the marvels which they contain,” Taylor then wrote.
Smartphones have since taken over so many everyday functions that entire categories of object are redundant. Those that are left are not easily influenced by an independent designer. Taylor focused instead on furniture design, on which it was still possible to have an impact, in particular at Orangebox, which he joined in 2002.
“Human dynamics are the same. That is the beauty of furniture – a chair from 1920 is essentially the same as a chair of today,” he said. “The chair is consistent and the table is consistent but what is not consistent is the dynamic of the context around them, what happens at the table, all the paranoias and ideas of the people sitting at the table, that’s what changed unbelievably dramatically in ways we never thought of.”
When it comes to technology, Taylor believed that if designers can’t shape it, they should try to humanise it: “The role of design has to be the creation of more engaging, softer, kinder and more humane work environments as a counterpoint to the continuously accelerating demands of technology and its increasing control of our workplace. We have to use design to help balance the tsunami of ever-shortening tech cycles of change and obsolescence.”
Taylor was married twice. His first marriage, to Sue Minter, an interior designer, ended in divorce. In 2023 he married Clare Chandler, a psychologist and coach, and she survives him.
• Gerard Taylor, designer, born 3 March 1955; died 20 June 2025
