If you were a furniture flâneur in the interwar years, strolling along Tottenham Court Road, you would most probably pause at Heal & Son’s furniture shop. The handsome frontage would draw you inside to see room sets of modern furniture, laid out to appeal to those with an interest in modern design. Their furniture was easy to look at and easy to live with: clean lines, neat silhouettes, minimal finishes, and above all, practical. All these qualities have stood it in good stead within the antiques market today. The magic label ’Heal & Son’ is saleroom gold today.
Ambrose Heal was chairman of Heal & Son from 1913 – 1953. He inherited his family’s furniture business in 1913, although he had begun working there, aged 21, in 1893. Heal's had sold mattresses, and then beds, from their premises on Tottenham Court Road since 1818. The 20th century saw their wares expand into all areas of home (and garden) furnishing. By the time he took over the hot spot at Heal & Son, Ambrose was a shaker and mover in design circles. Soon he would co-found the influential Design and Industries Association in 1915, with pals Frank Pick (of London Underground) and Harry Peach (of Dryad furniture and handicrafts) and he unapologetically used the Heal & Son brand and shop to push a modernist design agenda through. And it is this modernism, embodied in vintage pieces of Heal’s furniture, that appeals so much to us today. Heal & Son furniture always had (and has) a special appeal for designers and architects.
Miles Griffith has been dealing in Heal’s furniture for over 30 years. From a base in Thornton-in-Lonsdale, a village in North Yorkshire, he got into selling Heal’s furniture simply because he liked it. He has seen fashion slowly embrace anything made by Heal’s, to the point where it has become common saleroom practice to use the epithet ‘Heal’s style’ for all sorts of wannabe furniture. ‘Because its labelled or buttoned, everyone has clued into it. But not everything they made was labelled. Contracted furniture, such as an order for a hotel that didn’t go through the showroom, often wasn’t labelled.’ Miles uses his original Heal's catalogues to help identify pieces. ‘There aren’t that many different designs going on,’ he says. ‘Other companies plagiarised Heal's, tweaking the designs just enough to avoid copyright, often adding a small embellishment. 90% of the furniture that you see attributed to Heal's wasn’t made by them.’
As with any serious purchase, buying from the dealers who have lived with the stuff for decades is a good start and a safter place for your money. There is also the added benefit of talking to someone who knows lots of interesting things about your antique. At any one time Miles has chairs, beds, cupboards, highly desirable bedside cabinets and some nice outdoor furniture for sale. It would be awfully chic (then and now) to have a Heal & Son garden bench, would it not? Miles agrees: ‘They did a lovely range of garden tables with chairs that tucked neatly underneath. These sell well today. Some were made for Heal's by Castles teak furniture, who were ship breakers and they recycled warships into garden furniture.’
Originally Heal & Son was advertised as ‘sanitary furniture’, easy to clean. A word that has no glamour for us these days, ‘sanitary’ meant something different in a design world that preached ‘form follows function’. When you bought your furniture you could choose different finishes – limed, bleached, stained dark or painted different colours. And the woods were oak, mahogany and walnut. They also used pine but that was almost always painted. Miles expands: ‘Back in the day oak was their cheapest wood. But nowadays it’s hard to sell vintage pieces that aren’t made of oak.’
Heal’s furniture seems to have sold well in the home counties and Miles needs to travel down south to source much of his Heal & Son stock. ‘A lot of their furniture was sold to people who had small second homes. They’d have it sent out to their weekend cottages. I buy quite a lot of Heal's from homes on the south coast, holiday towns. I buy very little Heal's furniture in the north and a lot of furniture I sell goes to London and the Cotswolds.’ Happily, the value of Heal & Son furniture just keeps on going up, so it is a solid investment. Miles thinks the simple modernity of the furniture designs are what give them longevity as antiques and means they blend well in many different types of homes. ‘It’s just so simple, well made and nicely proportioned. I’ve delivered Heal's furniture to Tudor houses, thatched cottages and modern flats. It goes to all sorts of different places and looks well in all of them.’
