Kenneth Grange, who has died aged 95, was the most important British product designer of the second half of the 20th century. Even if they don’t know his name, most people in Britain are familiar with his work: the Kenwood Chef food processor, the Kodak Instamatic camera, the Ronson Rio hairdryer, the Morphy Richards iron. These everyday objects are part of all our histories. Grange was also responsible for the redesign of the InterCity 125 high-speed train and the TX1 version of the London taxi in 1997.
He was a tall, handsome, effusive man, a joker with that element of inner moral purpose often found in the designers of his post-war generation. He grew up with a determination to make the world a better place visually, always emphasizing functional efficiency. Grange was a master of reassessing use, but he also saw design in terms of pure pleasure. He wanted us to share in the surprising grace of the experience as the 125 train roared along the track.
When he set up his own design consultancy in 1956, Grange was one of the few designers working in what was then old-fashioned consumer goods. Many of his early commissions came through the Council of Industrial Design (now the Design Council), a government body set up with the task of improving national design standards. Grange’s commission to design Britain’s first parking meter, the Venner, introduced in 1958, came through the council. So too did his introduction to Kenneth Wood, owner of the Woking company whose household products were marketed as Kenwood. Grange’s sleek and easy-to-use Kenwood Chef food mixer became a status symbol for housewives of his day.
Like his near-contemporary Vidal Sassoon, Grange came from a non-artistic background and had a similarly innate sense of visual style. Both men were quintessential 1960s talents, Sassoon with his geometric haircuts, Grange with a range of urban modern products for a new, self-consciously fashionable age. He became a key designer for the growing market in “wearable accessories”: pens for Parker, lighters for Ronson, the melamine and smoked perspex Milward Courier razor which won the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award for Elegant Design in 1963 (now known as the Prince Philip Designers Award). Did Prince Philip himself use it? Grange insisted that he did.
In 1972 Grange joined forces with four of the rising stars of his field – Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Theo Crosby and Mervyn Kurlansky – to set up the cutting-edge design group Pentagram. This was a multi-disciplinary consultancy, described by Grange as “a one-stop shop”, providing specialist services in graphic design and advertising, architecture and – Grange’s own area – product design.
Pentagram became the bee’s knees of design consultancies: ambitious, professional, intelligent and cheerful. It attracted loyal clients, including Reuters, for whom Grange designed the Reuters Monitor, a state-of-the-art computer terminal and keyboard, superbly designed in heavy silver aluminium sheet.
In the 1970s, Grange was occupied with the most notable of his design briefs: the aerodynamics, interior layout and nose cone design of British Rail’s High Speed Train (HST). The InterCity 125 was a key element in BR’s strategy to tempt passengers away from cars and planes and back onto trains. However, the first prototype HST they came up with was, in Grange’s opinion, “a clumsy, brutish thing”.
He realised that he could only improve the appearance by first tackling the aerodynamics. On his own initiative (and at his own expense) he spent a week working at night with a consultant engineer at Imperial College London, where there was a wind tunnel. During these experiments they came up with a number of new ideas, such as removing the buffers, hiding the couplings in the underside of the nose cone and giving the train a more futuristic look.
It was launched in 1976 with its radical, dynamically angled nose design. Grange was always careful to honour the expertise of the engineers he worked with. Yet it was his great triumph and an enduring symbol of the best of mid-20th century British design. The HST – still in use on selected passenger services almost 50 years later – transformed the public experience of rail travel.
He was born in East London, the son of Hilda (née Long), a train driver, and Harry Grange, an East End policeman. Kenneth grew up in what he once vividly described as “a bacon and eggs house”, neatly furnished with a three-piece suit and floral curtains, the dominant colour being brown. Nevertheless, his parents supported his chosen career in what was then called “commercial art”. During the Second World War the family moved to Wembley in North London, and Kenneth won a scholarship to the Willesden School of Art and Crafts, where he studied drawing and lettering from the age of 14.
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These basic skills gave him access to a series of architectural firms: Arcon; Bronek Katz and R Vaughan; Gordon and Ursula Bowyer; and, from 1952, the remarkably versatile architect and industrial designer Jack Howe – all of whom were modernists and driving forces in the post-war campaign to rebuild Britain using newly available materials and techniques.
Grange took part in the 1951 Festival of Britain, where he collaborated with Gordon and Ursula Bowyer on the Sports Pavilion for the South Bank Exhibition. For many designers of Grange’s generation – including Sir Terence Conran and my husband, David Mellor – the festival would be a lasting source of inspiration. As Grange later said: “You couldn’t take a step without seeing something incredible – the cigar-shaped Skylon, the vast Dome of Discovery, extraordinary metal sculptures, waterfalls that twisted and turned. There was nothing like anything I had ever seen before.”
While much of British design was still based on craft, dominated by ideas dating back to William Morris, Grange felt the fascination of machine production. He was enthusiastic about the streamlined designs based on new technology that were beginning to infiltrate Britain from the US, describing the moulded plastic Eames chair, for example, as “a rocket exploding in our narrow world”. I remember being impressed when I first visited him in Hampstead, north London, to see that he owned not one Eames lounge chair but three.
Grange’s natural resilience stood him in good stead in the 1970s and 1980s, those lean years for designers when British manufacturing was losing its way and, as he described it, “rampant accounting became the new dynamic in British industry”. He welcomed overseas clients, especially as he enjoyed working in Japan, where he appreciated the innate Japanese design consciousness. One particularly successful commission was a sewing machine designed for the Maruzen Sewing Machine Co in Osaka, for sale in Europe. During trips to Japan he began what would become a considerable collection of beautiful wooden geisha combs.
Pentagram itself flourished, moving from Paddington to larger and more stylish premises in a renovated dairy in Notting Hill in 1984. At that time, it employed over 80 designers and assistants across a range of disciplines, and the communal dining room became an ever-welcoming chat club, a meeting point for the London design world of the day. I remember some fantastic parties at Pentagram, including the celebration of Grange’s wedding to Apryl Swift in 1984.
For Grange himself, the 1980s brought increasing public recognition. In 1983, a solo exhibition of his work was held at the Boilerhouse in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
By then he was already hailed as Britain’s most successful product designer. He was appointed CBE in 1984 and knighted in 2013. In 1985 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal College of Art and in 1986 he became a master of the elite group of Royal Designers for Industry. Success never spoiled him. He had a self-deprecating sense of humour and retained a kind of boyish innocence, as if he could hardly believe his good fortune.
The sheer challenge of the job had always been his driving force. After retiring from Pentagram in 1997, after 25 years as a partner, he and Apryl embarked on a project of their own, converting an old stone barn in the remote countryside near Coryton in Devon into a spectacular modern house with a spiral staircase of highly ingenious modular construction. It took five years to complete, with Grange commuting weekly between London and Devon on his trusty high-speed train.
In 2011 the Design Museum held a retrospective, Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Modern. He continued to design into his 80s. Later commissions included the perfect men’s shirt for the fashion designer Margaret Howell; a revamped series of classic lamps – the Type 3, Type 75 and, in his 90th year, the Type 80 – for Anglepoise, where he had become design director in 2003; and a genuinely comfortable collection of chairs for the elderly. The general standard of design for the elderly irritated him. “Where is the decent modernist care home?” he asked.
Typical of Grange’s wacky 60s humor was his design of a human-shaped wooden bookcase that was converted into a coffin, the ultimate exercise in recycling. “If I ever open my clogs, I’ll take the books out and I’ll put them in, with the lid on, until the big customer in the sky.”
Two previous marriages ended in divorce. Apryl survives him.
• Kenneth Henry Grange, designer, born 17 July 1929; died 21 July 2024
• Fiona MacCarthy died in 2020