My friend Peter Leonard, who has died aged 69 of cancer, was a designer of both visionary and traditional sensibilities. He enjoyed huge success with his company Peter Leonard Associates (now Peter Leonard and Company) from 1980 onwards, working from a studio on Poland Street, Soho, in central London. Overseeing his team of 30, he created vibrant interior and product designs for residential and commercial clients.
Peter’s ethos was catholic in its approach, encompassing interiors and architecture. He was at the forefront of a new wave of consultancies reshaping British design in the 1980s and early 90s. Innovation and problem solving were key to his work for clients that included Harrods, WH Smith, Liberty, Jasper Conran, Laura Ashley, Next, the Virgin megastore in Paris, EMI, Ideal Standard, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. He also established Soho Design, a lifestyle store on Kings Road in Chelsea, selling furniture and accessories.
Born in Soham, Cambridgeshire, to Peggy (nee Hobbs) and Derrick Leonard, a butcher, Peter was educated at Soham grammar school. He explored his love of the US as a high school exchange student in Gridley, Illinois, with the American Field Service Program, maintaining a lifelong connection with his “American family”, the Campbells. Peter took a degree in 3D design at Kingston School of Art in south-west London, then returned to Illinois as an MA student in the theatre design department at Northwestern University, working as a teaching fellow.
It was there that our paths first crossed. Even then, his theatrical work displayed an agile and inventive mind far surpassing fellow students and faculty.
After completing an MA in Chicago, Peter returned to London and worked briefly in Terence Conran’s studio. Supremely confident, he quickly formed his own studio. His training in 3D design provided a neat way to translate his ideas into substance. He was a brilliant draughtsman and artist. For well-heeled clients and close friends, alike, he was a magical resource. Through his imagination, grand properties were rendered intimate and bijou locations morphed into small palaces, reflecting his childhood fascination with historical ideas combined with a modernist aesthetic.
Peter’s interior and garden design proficiency bore fruit in his own homes in the UK and continental Europe. In 2012 he returned to Soham, where he was thrilled to finally buy a Georgian manor house in the high street that he had admired since childhood. Envisaged as a weekend getaway, instead it became a home for him and his husband, Martin Mathurin.
Throwing himself into Soham community life, he joined the town council and was a huge supporter of the local Viva Arts Group. His village legacy also survives in his tree-planting scheme on the high street, where he could often be seen in his dressing-gown watering his beloved tree project just after dawn on a hot summer morning.
Peter is survived by Martin, whom he met in 1998 and married in 2022, and by his brothers, Tim and Mark.
