Finmar and the furniture of the future: The sale of Alvar Aalto's plywood furniture in the UK, 1934-1939

Journal of Design History

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 145-156

  Davies, Kevin ^a  

^a Southampton   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Aalto, Alvar; Design and Industries Association; Great Britain; Marketing; Modernism; Plywood

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249171059     PISSN: 09524649     EISSN: 17417279     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jdh/11.2.145     Document Type: Review

References (66)

1. At the time the company was actually known as Huonekalu-ja Rakkenhustydlas Korhonen Oy, but throughout the text I have referred to the company by its simpler present-day name.
2. It was not until the foundation of Artek in 1936 that attempts were made to consolidate the Finnish market.
3. J. Pallasmaa (ed.), Alvar Aalto Furniture, Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1984;
4. G. Schildt, Alvar Aalto: the Decisive Years, Rizzoli, 1986.
5. Pallasmaa, op. cit.;
6. Schildt, op. cit.
7. See, for instance, P. Morton Shand, 'A tuberculosis sanatorium in Finland: A. Aalto architect', Architectural Review, vol. 74, no. 442, 1933, pp. 85-90;
8. Baird Dennison (P. Morton Shand), 'From angles to body curves', Architectural Review, vol. 74, no. 441, 1933, pp. 71-2;
9. P. Morton Shand, 'Standard wooden furniture at the Finnish Exhibition designed by Aino Marsio-Aalto and Alvar Aalto', Architectural Review, vol. 74, no. 445, 1933, pp. 220-1.
10. Source: letter from P. Morton Shand to Alvar Aalto, Aalto archive, Munkkiniemi, Helsinki, Finland. Shand had recently been disinherited, had some financial difficulties, and was presumably looking for business opportunities out of necessity.
11. John Betjeman, who also wrote for the Architectural Review at this date, was responsible for dealing with Fortnum and Mason because of his aristocratic contacts.
12. This was called Boumphrey, Arundel and Co., a company that described itself as 'manufacturers of "The Sesame" record cabinet, patented in all major countries of the world'. The letterhead for this company was used in correspondence with Korhonen Oy until early January 1934. A letter from Shand to Aalto (dated 7 September 1933) indicates that Shand and Boumphrey had already been granted sales rights for his furniture in the UK. Mendelsohn and Chermayeff, through Plan Ltd., had also expressed an interest.
13. Shand, who was a writer, had very little to do with the daily running of the company, although he became involved when problems arose because he knew Aalto well and was able to write to him in German (a second language they shared). Boumphrey (when he wasn't skiing) worked for Finmar two days a week. Another director, R. W. Potter, was a tennis-playing friend of Boumphrey and took little active part in the business, although it is likely that he supplied the financial risk. The majority of correspondence and business between Finland and the UK was handled by J. J. Faulkner, about whom little information exists. He appears to have had previous experience in the furniture trade as a salesman.
14. See Kevin Davies, 'Scandinavian furniture in Britain: Finmar and the UK market, 1949-52', Journal of Design History, vol. 10, no. 1, 1997, pp. 39-52.
15. According to Pekka Suhonen, 'Artek, to the Finnish public of the 1930s, meant a modest but strikingly modern shop in the Union Bank of Finland's building in Fabianinkatu street. Something they were perhaps unaware of was that 40-50% of its sales were made abroad, mainly in Britain'; from Pekka Suhonen, 'Artek 50 years: a short history', in Artek 1935-85, Taideteollisusmuseo Helsinki, 1985, p. 14.
16. Data for the consumption of Aalto's furniture within Finland are only available for the period of Artek's existence because some of Korhonen Oy's records - which would document the early period - were lost in a fire at the factory.
17. During the period the exchange rate was fixed at £1 = Fmk227. These figures have been compiled from official Finnish trade statistics and the archive of Artek. Both of these present an incomplete picture, which is why there are gaps.
18. It is not clear who manufactured the other furniture that was exported to the UK. Jukka Korhonen, the managing director of Korhonen Oy, has suggested the firm Schauman Oy since it was involved in the manufacture of plywood. Asko-Aventius of Lahti is also a likely candidate. Carl-Johan Boman's Z chair, made by Oy Boman Ab, appears in Finmar catalogues, but no information is available about quantities exported. With the exception of the latter, it is not, to my knowledge, furniture that has attracted the attention of design historians.
19. Belgium fits roughly into the same pattern for Industrial output and growth. See D. H. Aldcroft, The European Economy 1914-1970, Croom Helm, 1978, p. 81.
20. Calculated from information given in National Income Statistics 1938-47, Statistical Office of the United Nations, and Statistical Yearbook of the League of Nations 1938/39, League of Nations.
21. Heal's stock books contain the coded cost and sale prices for hundreds of different models of furniture that they sold. Amongst these models it is exceptional to find pieces that were cheaper than the equivalent Finmar model; Heal's archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, Archive of Art and Design. Finmar also took orders for furniture and fittings to clients' designs to be made up by Korhonen Oy in Finland. This suggests that it was cheaper for Finmar's clients to do this than get the work done to the same design in the UK. Korhonen Oy archive.
22. Letter to Finmar from Korhonen Oy. There is also considerable correspondence from Wohnbedarf to Aalto held at the Aalto Foundation, Munkkiniemi, Helsinki, Finland.
23. F. Mehlau-Wiebking, A. Ruegg & R. Tropeano, Schweizer Typenmobel 1925-35: Siegfried Giedion und die Wohnbedarf AG, GTA Verlag, ETH Zurich, 1989.
24. A. Olafsdottir, 'Les Meubles d'Alvar Aalto: leur diffusion internationale (1920-40)', in L'Internationalisation de design dans les années trente, 1994, p. 207. This paper presents an account of the appearance of Aalto furniture outside Finland, but gives no idea of the influence of underlying economic or political factors.
25. Giedion was in the USA in 1938 lecturing at Harvard and appears to have shown a diminishing commitment to Wohnbedarf.
26. Letters to Korhonen Oy from Finmar.
27. Giedion and Wohnbedarf also had commitments to sell other ranges of furniture, for instance pieces designed by Marcel Breuer, that could have provided a conflict of interest.
28. See Charlotte Benton, A Different World: Émigré Architects in Britain 1928-1958, RIBA Heinz Gallery, 1995.
29. 'In 1938 Alvar Aalto and Nils Gustav Hahl [a founder of Artek] visited the factory ... Alvar Aalto had a [laminated] bent leg in his hand and said that the product must be sold so cheaply that only the cost of the raw material would be charged', Paavo Korhonen, translated interview transcript, Artek archive. Paavo Korhonen was the son of Otto Korhonen.
30. Aalto thought Shand a snob.
31. Gregory Brown, 'The Design and Industries anomaly', DIA Quarterly Journal, December 1927.
32. The DIA organized a series of talks on design that were broadcast by the BBC every Tuesday between 18 April and 27 June 1933. A number of these were published in The Listener so that its readers were familiar with some of the ideas and debates on modern design.
33. 'Those who went to Stockholm this year, and more so those who were unable to, will alike welcome the news that an exhibition of Swedish glass, textiles, ceramics, printing etc., which were so outstanding at the Stockholm exhibition, is to be brought to England in May of the coming year. The DIA is cooperating with the Anglo-Swedish society in the organisation of this exhibition', DIA Quarterly Journal, October 1930, p. 14.
34. Faulkner's letters to Korhonen Oy, rather naïvely, suggest that this was an intolerable delay for Finmar, who do not seem to have anticipated that, having put in a large order for furniture, Korhonen Oy might have to make some of it. They also do not seem to have considered that shipping goods across the Baltic was sometimes a little more difficult in winter.
35. I am grateful to Brian Lutz, marketing director of Artek, for pointing this out to me. Currently Artek only supply both domestic and contract markets in Finland where Aalto's furniture is something of a national institution, outside Finland the company feeds largely the contract market.
36. 'House at Chalfont St Giles', Architectural Review, vol. 78, 1935, p 174.
37. The De la Warr Pavilion was illustrated in Architectural Review, vol. 80, 1936, pp. 22-3.
38. 'Ramsgate Municipal Airport, architect D. Pleydell-Bouverie', Architectural Review, vol. 82, 1937, p. 3.
39. Highpoint, Architectural Review, vol. 79, 1936, p. 9;
40. Dudley Zoo, Architectural Review, vol. 82, 1937, p. 177.
41. 'The Pioneer Health Centre', Architectural Review, vol. 77, 1935, p. 203.
42. 'House at Woodmancote', Architectural Review, vol. 80, 1936, p. 291.
43. As shown in numerous photographs in the Artek archive.
44. Information in this paragraph has been collated from a number of sources. These are: Finmar letters, Korhonen Oy archive, Littoinen, Finland; furniture stock books, Heal's archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, Archive of Art and Design; Export figures for 1936, Artek archive, Helsinki, Finland.
45. Ake Tjeddar (interview June 1996), a former director of Artek who dealt with UK sales in the 1950s and 1960s, said that he found the UK market difficult because he initially lacked the personal contacts to make sales. This position eased when he was made a member of the Arts Club to which a number of architects belonged whom he was then able to meet over lunch and in the bar.
46. Giedion had suggested the foundation of MARS as a British wing of the CIAM.
47. Artek's records indicate that its directors were not entirely happy with the size of Finmar's market in Britain's colonies. It would appear that Finmar's directors only had effective business contacts in the UK.
48. Heal's archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Archive of Art and Design.
49. Heal's stock books for the period 1934-9 are not entirely unambiguous, and the record they present may be incomplete. The figure of 4% is based on Finmar furniture known to have been sold and would have to be revised upwards if Finmar sold Heal's any upholstered furniture (of which there is no record).
50. It is easy to see that cantilevered plywood chairs would be more likely to develop some kind of association with status amongst architects than with less structurally aware members of the general public.
51. Clearly there was some overlap between architects and DIA circles - I do not intend to imply that they were mutually exclusive groups, far from it.
52. 'The more English [sic] people can be attracted to Sweden, the better for Sweden, and the better for England too', N. L. Carrington, DIA Quarterly Journal, July 1930.
53. In reality their efforts were often more of a somewhat priggish propaganda campaign to improve the taste of the British consumer. An example would be the almost obsessive concern with advertising notices outside petrol stations and garages. For a history of the DIA, see R. Plummer, Nothing Need be Ugly, DIA, 1985.
54. I interviewed Geoffrey Dunn in November 1994. When I asked him if he didn't think selling Scandinavian goods was a little unpatriotic, he replied that it didn't matter to him where things came from as long as they were well designed. To be fair to him he was not absolutely consistent on this matter; when I told him that I thought a Robert Heritage chair (designed for the QE II) looked like a Finnish one I had seen, he replied, 'how could you be so beastly?'
55. Brown, op cit.
56. See, for instance, 'The DIA exhibition at Dunn's of Bromley', Design for Today, June 1936, p. 246. The accompanying illustration showed an extensive range of plywood furniture, which, with the exception of an Isokon stool, was supplied by Finmar.
57. See C. Wilk, Marcel Breuer Furniture and Interiors, Museum of Modern Art New York, 1981, pp. 126-46.
58. See M. Creese, 'Gerald Summers and Makers of Simple Furniture', Journal of Design History, vol. 5, no. 3, 1992, pp 183-205. Gerald Summers founded Makers of Simple Furniture in 1931-2 but did not start experimenting with making bent-ply furniture until late 1933. Creese stresses the importance of Aalto's designs for Summers' work.
59. Wilk, op cit.
60. This included items of furniture made to specific dimensions or pieces with non-standard finishes (one or two clients preferred their birch ply to be stained to a mahogany coloration).
61. Cited in Rosamund Allwood & Kedrun Laurie, R. D. Russell, Marian Pepler, exhibition catalogue, Inner London Education Authority, 1983.
62. Information in this paragraph comes from Richard Stone & D. A. Rowe, The Measurement of Consumers' Expenditure and Behaviour in the United Kingdom, 1920-1938, Cambridge, 1966.
63. However, many useful data from this text are conveniently summarized, tabulated and helpfully discussed in Sue Bowden & Ave Offner, 'The technological revolution that never was', in Victoria Grazia & Ellen Furlough (eds.), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, University of California Press, 1996. Bowden & Offner's paper (one of a series on related topics) considers the consumption of domestic electric appliances during the inter-war period in Britain and provides an illuminating analysis that is complementary to that presented in this paper.
64. In the early 1950s Aalto furniture was approximately five times its pre-war price. In the intervening period inflation was low.
65. Despite the fact that, in the case of the DIA, specific business interests were, arguably, sometimes counter to its aims.
66. This is a paraphrase from an introductory essay by M. Eidelberg, 'The Modernist canon', in M. Eidelberg (ed.), Design 1935-65: What Modern Was, Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Montréal, Abrams, 1991, pp. 22-8.