Her second career as a bespoke rug designer and supplier, from her King’s Road gallery, with a showroom in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, illustrates her mastery of color, as you can see in her book Walking on Art. World of Interiors credits her as Britain’s leading carpet designer. To live with such a creative partner, to walk in bare feet on

Maurice, who had studied there himself before the war, knew that the Royal College of Art, a wholly postgraduate college, was conducting an experiment by taking three students without first degrees to see how they compared. I applied, took the exam, was interviewed, although possessing a scant knowledge of furniture woods, and was thrilled to be

Folklore depicts invention as a flash of brilliance. That eureka moment! But it rarely is, I’m afraid. It is more about accepting failure to be able to achieve that moment of ultimate success. Funnily enough, engineers who are good at inventing things are never satisfied with their latest creation. They tend to look at it quizzically and say, “I

Even so, Citroën was to make a key commercial mistake. Between 1955 and 1970, the company launched no new models. Then, realizing that the car-buying public was looking for something new, the company appeared to panic, investing in and launching a host of new cars. The expense bankrupted the company. Taken over by Peugeot in 1974, it was never the

Dyson advertising focuses on how our products are engineered and how they work, rather than on gimmicks and snappy sales lines. Manufacturing itself is highly creative.

Bernard was a fundamentally serious person. During my first face-to-face tutorial with him he said, “When you design something, everything about it has to have a purpose. There has to be a reason.” I looked around at the best designs of the time like Issigonis’s Mini, the new architecture of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, and at the radical

“Just add lightness” became Fuller’s mantra. This led him to create his lightweight geodesic domes. Patented in 1954, these hemispherical lattice-grid structures composed of triangular elements offered the greatest volume of covered space for the least surface area. Strong, wind- and snow-proof, they found favor with the military, polar research

An earlier graduate, Allen Jones, a contemporary of David Hockney, who had designed erotic furniture, was refused a degree by the RCA because he was unwilling to submit the written portion of our exams, arguing, along with David Hockney, that they were artists, not writers, and that academics didn’t have to paint paintings. Years later, as Provost

Many years later, I was intrigued to learn in a book by Virginia Ironside that 85 percent of all British prime ministers, from Robert Walpole to John Major, and twelve U.S. presidents, from George Washington to Barack Obama, lost their fathers as children.