If anybody understands the links between design and the economy, it should be Ross Bull (1978 – 82)

Ross Bull leads a double life. In one he’s an economist: in the other he’s the co-owner of Coexistence, selling high-design furniture, lighting, fabrics and wallpaper in London and Bath. He here explains his involvement in both fields, and the reverberations between them.

My partner Mary Wiggin comes from the family which used to own Old Hall stainless steel, which was taken over by Prestige in 1969. She was always in a family ambience where industrial design was of some interest, meeting people like Robert Welch, a design consultant for the company. When I met Mary – who incidentally holds Coexistence together – it just happened that my particular interest was in contemporary art, and we decided that we’d put resources together and try to set up a shop which would be involved with design and the integration of particular products of visual interest – not necessarily just furniture and lighting.

There was no design or architectural background to my family, and design was something that I’d never really been aware of. I remember Mary taking me along to see an exhibition of Italian furniture at Harrods in 1972 or thereabouts, and that was the first time I’d ever come across the names and the personalities and the materials which were so much part of the Italian scene at that time as now. My reaction was one of excitement – which provided the challenge of trying to do something interesting with Coexistence.

We opened in Bath in 1974. We were perhaps too unsure of our own abilities to open up in London, because of the competition that existed, and because people were by no means as interested in design in 1974 as they are today. There was possibly less to lose by opening elsewhere. We wanted to live in a beautiful city which had good communications with London and Heathrow, and the only one which really fitted the bill at the time was Bath.

In our display policy, we’ve tried to get away from the rather intimidating implication that a well-designed piece of furniture needs to be fitted into a certain kind of environment. So we don’t place our pieces in a pure white building, or a very classical contemporary environment. What we’re trying to say to customers is, look at the furniture or lighting for what it is, and then try to identify how you might select a particular product to put in your own home.

For that reason we never do room sets. You can’t really provide imagination for other people: if they haven’t got it, they’re not going to be interested in things which require them to take an active part in the decision-making process.

It is extremely difficult to keep the impetus going, in terms of interesting displays, especially in the huge building in Covent Garden where we opened our London shop in 1978. And to some extent we have to live with the legacy of our past mistakes. So the products we carry currently are not necessarily a true reflection of our design tastes now. Over the six years since we first opened we’ve however disciplined ourselves to impose tighter and tighter constraints on what we purchase and how we display it.

To start with we had no particular design credo. When you start a project with no real background in it, it’s rather like doing a thesis. You have to do a lot of reading, and absorb an enormous amount of information. It’s a question of setting up a huge data bank, filling it with information, and then selecting what is valuable and ditching the remainder.

We tracked down all the major manufacturers in each of the major countries, the major architects and the major designers, and we sifted through the material. It would be very much easier to do that today, because there is almost an orthodoxy of agreement about who are the major influences. But in 1974 the majority of architects wouldn’t have known the relevant names, and the majority of retailers weren’t interested. There has been a fairly significant change in awareness among consumers and in the press about who the big names are, and why they are a bit more famous.

I don’t know that we really knew exactly what we wanted to achieve when we started out. We tried to maximise the number of degrees of freedom which we gave ourselves, so that there would be lots of avenues to explore. Making a large profit was never a major objective, or we would never have done what we did. One idea certainly was to be a stimulus. If a certain group of people in Italy or wherever can regularly turn out exciting products, I find it very difficult intellectually to understand why this country, which obviously has good designers and architects, can’t do the same.

The process of converting ideas into some tangible object with visual qualities seems to be extremely difficult in this country. If you look at the cars we produce, or whatever, they tend generally to be very hackneyed, very middle-run

Among the furniture and lighting products in our shop, the British representation is really small. The majority is still Italian. We accept it as a fait accompli. In this particular sector there’s very little that British management can do. It is as it is. Where we do get a stronger British feeling is among the wallpapers and fabrics that we sell.

We made the move into fabrics and wallpapers because we knew that the number of people who would buy furniture and lighting from Coexistence would make an operation based on that activity difficult to justify, Our revenue really comes from contract work on flats, houses, hotels and offices, and from selling marginal items which can be ordered from samples.

We go about our work in a rather uncommercial way; we don’t do ourselves any favours, and run a very risky race. And that’s one of the reasons I keep on another profession. In the last resort, I’ll never want to be dependent on Coexistence for my bread and butter. That may sound rather dilettante, but it has taken a lot of hard work to keep two professional lives going simultaneously, and to try to achieve something in both of them. But the reason for it is, by being financially independent, you can afford to take more risks. The minute you just have to get turnover, you begin to compromise your standards und limit your experimenting.

In any case, I need the two halves to my professional life. When I’m away from Coexistence working as an economist, I have time to think about where Coexistence should be going, and what it could be doing. A lot of decisions come from trying to see the wood for the trees. And that’s also true of the work I do for developing countries: I have time to think about it out of context. I wouldn’t like to have to choose between the two, but if I could only have one, I would choose economics – because I find the timelag and the uncertainty in trying to bring about a change in British production too frustrating.

Listening to the discussion of economic policy in the UK, I find it largely irrelevant whether the economy should follow a monetarist or a Keynesian path. Such a choice ignores the basic maxim, which is that all output is either an export or an import-substitute. Where we are failing is in producing sufficient exports or import-substitutes. And until we decide to start designing things that people in this country and abroad want in large numbers, which compete on price, service, quality and delivery, it doesn’t matter whether we follow monetarist policy or Keynesian policy, or any other kind of policy. The government is simply tampering with various
economic parameters such as tax rates and the money supply which will never solve the basic structural problems of the UK.

I hope it will be possible to use the experience we pick up in Coexistence to help get the message across to those industries that we are criticising.

For example, last year I took time off economics and worked full time in Coexistence, because we had got to the stage where we needed to set up some systems whereby we could operate more than one shop successfully. During that year I became quite involved with various design colleges, which led me to realise just how inadequate our teaching is in one important respect. Business schools teach business, but very little about design: design schools teach design, but very little about business. I’ve been trying to find out whether there would be any possibility of linking design and business schools together.

Various connections led me to the Cranfield Institute of Technology, which has just set up the Cranfield Product Engineering Centre, with the help of Department of Industry funds, plus other money. I talked recently to the Centre’s director about trying to establish links between his unit and important design colleges, to develop a basic communication between potential production managers and accountants and the future designers they will rely on to produce the products which should keep their firms in business and people employed.

If we tried to take Coexistence into direct production it is likely that we would add proportionately little to the nation in terms of value added and employment, yet run the risk of going bust at the same time. But if, as a result of all the lessons I can see around me in Coexistence in respect of the products that Britain produces, we can take another route, (for example via the Cranfield approach) we can hope to be able to influence those institutions which are turning out managers and designers. Hopefully in the medium term, the next ten years, we might see things change. People are highly responsive, so long as you get to them early.

Our other contribution will be to try and increase the number of Coexistences both in the UK and abroad. We would like to do things on a much larger scale: increasing the number of outlets we have would obviously increase our turnover, and hopefully the demand for good products.

Our approach has been to try and identify interesting British companies which will clearly grow, and see if we can’t grow with them. In the UK this would therefore promote import-substitutes, while abroad this would promote exports. There are several companies which have a good track record, and strong possibilities for expansion, like Osborne and Little, Designers’ Guild, and Penhaligon’s.

This is one reason we concentrate most of our resources on the Bath shop. Most people think that is weird, because they see London as a major focus point, and a pinnacle. But our view is that, if we were to expand and develop Coexistence, we would open up out of London, so the logic is to base those other shops on the Coexistence which is already out of London.

There is now a much more receptive attitude towards design among consumers, which makes the situation in British industry that much more frustrating. If there are now so many more people who fully understand that the world doesn’t stop at Dover, that other people in the world like nice things too, and that we could be producing for those people rather than leaving it for example to the Italians, it makes it all the more puzzling to know why it is that British management and production doesn’t respond. I suppose we shouldn’t underestimate how long it takes to change an industrial base which, among other things, is still adjusting to our position today relative to the middle of the 19th century.

What may happen is, by the time we have got the management which understands the need for design, ordinary consumer products won’t be produced in this country; they’ll be produced in the third world. For at least twenty five years British industry has been struggling to keep itself in employment, and they are years that in a way have been wasted.

It is a great pity that it is taking management so long to understand the need for quality products, because you never get a wasted period back again.