The Ercolion’s New Suspenders

Easy chairs with loose cushions on a Windsor frame have come to epitomise Ercol, the first being the cable-sprung 176 Tub Easy Chair (1951). Yet, although it might seem natural to have extended the range in this direction, at the time this concept was completely untried: ‘No one else would dream of creating an easy chair out of a Windsor chair,’ Ercolani pointed out.¹⁶ The challenge was how to combine the chair frame and the upholstery in a visually harmonious way to create comfortable cushioned seating that retained the Windsor chair aesthetic.

The striking colours and textures of Ercol’s post-war upholstery fabrics complemented the warm tones of its beech chair frames, adding to the appeal of the furniture. Its 1955 Windsor Contemporary Furniture Reference Sheet alluded to ‘a specially selected range of contemporary fabrics.’ These were very much in evidence in the company’s colour advertisements and catalogues throughout the 1950s and 60s. Some of Ercol’s fabrics were custom-designed by Marianne Straub, a Swiss-born émigré textile designer renowned for her subtle and imaginative weaves.¹⁷ One of Ercol’s major suppliers was the Stratford-on-Avon firm of Tibor, run by the Hungarian-born émigré designer Tibor Reich (1916-1996), renowned for his ‘Deep Texture Weaves’.¹⁸ The two firms worked closely together to ensure that Tibor’s upholstery fabrics synchronised perfectly with Ercol’s frames. In 1955 the Coventry retailer Owen Owen mounted an exhibition called Adventure with Colour juxtaposing Windsor furniture with Tibor fabrics.¹⁹

Windsor easy chairs fall into distinct categories: those with a back cushion as well as a seat cushion or those where the bow back was left exposed as a feature; and those with an open-framed sprung seat or a solid wooden seat, as in the 317 Grandfather Tub Chair (1955). The term ‘Grandfather’ denoted designs on a larger scale than normal, in this case a chair with a higher and wider back. Another closely related model, the 315 Grandfather Rocking Chair (1955) was praised by Design magazine as ‘extraordinarily comfortable’ and ‘attractive from any angle’.²⁰ As Alex Gardner-Medwin noted: ‘Much thought must have gone into the design for the chair to be so reasonably priced and still maintain good quality.’ One of the novel features of these two chairs was that the bow was strengthened by a pair of supplementary spindles forking from a projecting support at the base of the frame. This ingenious device, derived from traditional Windsor chairs, provided structural reinforcement in a visually harmonious way.