Ercol Windsor Furniture Story, Part 1

The Windsor Contemporary Furniture Family continued to grow steadily during the 1950s, with additional pieces being developed to meet a broader range of household needs. From 1953 to 1956 the collection was publicised through large fold‑out reference sheets. The first bound catalogue appeared in 1957, illustrated initially in sepia, with colour photographs of room settings added the following year. Similar brochures were produced annually until the end of the 1960s. It was not until the 1970s that the style and format changed.

Right from the start, a vital element in developing the Windsor Range had been to harness the potential of machines, although for Ercolani automation was not an end in itself, but simply a means of producing better quality designs. ‘There is a constant striving for improvement in design and a determination that it is not the machine which will dictate the design but the design that governs the machine,’ noted The Cabinet Maker in 1958. Quite often the machines themselves needed redesigning in order to produce the components for a new model, so the design process was as much about improving the machines as about shaping the designs: ‘If it is found that when a new prototype design has been approved and there is no machine on the market which will make all that it demands, then the company will set out to design and make its own.’

As well as extending the overall scope of the collection, core designs in the Windsor Range were repeatedly modified over the years to improve particular aspects of their performance or appearance. This accorded with Ercolani’s belief that design was essentially evolutionary. He regarded his work as part of a continuum: ‘The whole evolution of art, as I see it, is by somebody doing better than has been done before,’ he remarked. ‘You cannot say, I have invented this ashtray, but you can make improvements to an ashtray.’ The Windsor chair had evolved organically over several hundred years. Ercolani’s designs were triggered – and informed – by these archetypes, but in developing and expanding the Windsor Range, he created a new tradition of his own through a gradual process of experimentation and refinement.