Fabulous fifties back in style

Crème de la Crème kitchen by John Lewis of Hungerford

With the Jubilee on the horizon, Caroline McGhie discovers how 2012 is embracing the look of Coronation Britain .

Suddenly, the Fifties look is the coolest, sleekest and smartest way to style your home. It blows away Victorian fussiness, Thirties drab, and Seventies floral, and it connects beautifully with our current love of clean, modern lines.

As Princess Elizabeth prepared for her Coronation, a storm of ideas and colours was gusting through kitchens and drawing rooms. Now we are falling in love with them all over again. Is it Diamond Jubilee fever? Are we chiming with a previous age of austerity? Or is it just that we all watch Mad Men?

What was then high-end and hard-to-get-hold-of is readily accessible now. Marks & Spencer (marksandspencer.com) has invited the old lion of the period, Sir Terence Conran, to design a collection using British materials and craftsmen, just as he and his cohorts wanted to do in the early Fifties. So young then, their work had a whiff of student idealism. Sixty years on, the look has become much more sophisticated.

The large Conran Amis sofa (from £899) is as pert and well-fed as a prize greyhound in your open-plan living room, wrapped in pure wool, available in cream, teal or grey. The Chaucer Armchair (£499-£599) is an office creature in a domestic skin, with raked back and solid wooden legs. It comes in ochre, which actually means deliciously sharp mustard. You can even buy Fifties style bookshelves, to use as room dividers. The oak Brindley Shelving Unit (£399) is designed to look like stacked, skewed boxes. And there are splay-legged coffee tables, pedestal lamps with scallop-shaped oak bases, and white fabric shades.

The design studio at John Lewis (johnlewis.com), never knowingly left behind, has been working on its own retro designs for the past year and a half. It has gone back to Ercol, makers of the iconic bentwood tables and chairs of the Fifties, and asked them to recreate their classics (Chiltern chair, £199, table £499).

Matthew Hilton furniture from John Lewis

“It’s so exciting to see it come alive again. We’re proud that it’s British,” says Jason Wilary-Attew, head of furniture buying at John Lewis. “There was a real belief then that the future was bright, and we’re harking back to that positivity.” 

 

Matthew Hilton has also produced designs for the store, with a weighty mid-century feel (Case Metropolis sofa range, £499-£1,300). Jason says these are distinguished by their “solid wood, proper joints, and expert craftsmanship ”.

Why all the charcoal and cream, when all the colours of a child’s crayon set burst open during the Fifties? Neutral colours on big items open up choice for customers, apparently. “You can drop in oranges or acid greens on cushions, then when you’re tired of them, you change them but keep the stylish furniture,” Jason says.

The 1950s kitchen is characterised by formica, cream gloss paint where sticky fingers might go, herbs and fruit on the wallpaper, and Omo under the sink. As Woman’s Own described it: “This is the room more than any other you love to keep shining and bright. A woman’s place? Yes it is! For it is the heart and centre of the meaning of home.”

Sixty years ago, there was a discrepancy between highbrow designs and everyday living, as Susannah Walker found while writing 1950s Modern, a Shire book to be published later this year. “A three-piece suite represented your married life,” she says. “You had to have something solid enough to last the length of your marriage. People didn’t necessarily go for the spindly wooden-legged look, as they thought it wasn’t substantial enough.”

The bright colours made her retinas hurt. “There were wild pinks, limes, mustards, which were astonishing.” Day-glo accessories — lamps, magazine stands, telephone tables — are what we often regard as Fifties kitsch, and are as collectable now as they were then. In response, Cath Kidston (cathkidston.com) has devised a Jubilee kitsch all her own, with tea-towels (£10), plates (£15), mugs (£8), oilcloth tablecloths (£35) and aprons (£20) in red-white-and-blue with images of the Queen, crowns, corgi s and Union flags.

Chair by Ercol Chiltern, available at John Lewis

So popular is the retro look that sales of the John Lewis of Hungerford’s Crème de la Crème kitchen doubled in 2011. It is based on the 1953 English Rose design, built by CSA Industries using aluminium left over from Spitfire noses. Today’s are made of hand-polished wood (from £17,000, john-lewis.co.uk). Jo Adlam and her husband, Ben Harrold, have just had one fitted in their one-bedroom fisherman’s cottage in Brancaster Staithe, Norfolk. “It’s a mini one, in pale blue, very sleek, modernist, not too beach-hut in colour, but with a hint of kitsch,” Jo says.

The Jubilee has revived a sense of pride in Britishness. Horrockses, which started selling ready-to-wear dresses, housecoats and beachwear in 1946, have come back this year with bed linen using some of the designs from dresses of the Forties and Fifties. The fabric design of a day dress worn by the Queen, with tiny pink roses and yellow stripes, is reproduced as a limited edition cushion (see offer ) and scarf. The cushion bears a photograph of the Queen wearing the dress on her 1954 Commonwealth Tour.

Horrockses is giving away 20 limited-edition Jubilee cushions. Enter by May 27 to Horrockses, Brookmann Home Ltd, 5 Universal Square, Devonshire St, Manchester M12 6JH or online at horrocksesfashions.co.uk, answering this: which year did the Queen make her first Commonwealth Tour? The first 20 correct answers drawn out will win. Winners will be informed on June 1.

Shire Publications is offering a 30 per cent discount on all books, including The 1950s Kitchen and The 1950s Home. Visit shirebooks.co.uk or call 01206 256002, quoting “Telegraph offer”.