Festival of Britain - The Legacy Continues: From Cups to Floors

From tableware to furniture, vinyl flooring to textiles, those stylised natural forms and atomic images are all around us today in a way that would have delighted the originators of those innovative forms all those years ago.

A veritable mountain of crockery utilising those self-same futuristic forms litters the market place today; there are many new companies springing up to take advantage of this trend and bring us spindly-lined designs on cups and saucers in mustard and turquoise. Added to this is the ever expanding world of the vintage china market place where old tableware is dredged up from a variety of sources and often sold alongside new products.

The market for genuine and reproduction examples of modernist furniture is more buoyant than ever with the acknowledged classics of the style dragging up lesser examples in their wake to be similarly revered and not burned.  It will soon become apparent  also, that furniture from this period and the better reproductions are manufactured to a considerably higher standard than most mainstream modern offerings.

With this newly re-discovered taste for colour and fun we are also seeing the return of the jazzy kitchen linoleum, although in this day and age it’s more likely to be vinyl flooring. Bold designs and bright colours are increasingly taking the place of sombre tones and natural textures. The advantages of a smooth floor surface that once captivated the post war house wife are becoming once more apparent to the busy homeowner, namely, the ease in which a vinyl floor surface is cleaned.   

Perhaps the most prominent and widely used application of mid-century colour and design is in the world of fabrics. Striking colour combinations and bold geometric designs lend themselves very well to the world of curtains and cushions and also enable the less adventurous to dip a tentative colour-toe into the 1950’s while maintaining a predominately contemporary interior.

It’s perhaps not necessary to engulf your total home environment with mid-century modern designs to the extent that you wake up in the night sweating, convinced that the Suez crisis is taking place just beyond the foot of the bed. A few well considered choice pieces will make that statement that says “Yes, I am forward looking Daddio”