Summary: Sir Ambrose Heal - designer, manufacturer, and retailer of furniture - was an important figure in design developments in early twentieth-century Britain. This book, which records his furniture designs and also puts them into the larger retail context, is the first compre - hensive review of his career. It reveals the multiple threads of creativity and craftsmanship, culture and commerce, ethics and enterprise, which he was able to weave into a successful business. The first part of the book is biographical, the second covers the detail of retail, and the third records the output of Heal's own Cabinet Factory. Inspired by the likes of John Ruskin and William Morris, Ambrose Heal transformed the family furnishing business, Heal's of Tottenham Court Road, London, to provide a broad middle-class public with distinctive, well-designed, well-made furniture and furnishings. As a business leader Heal was a 'benign dictator' yet he commanded fierce loyalty from his staff who were represented through democratically elected committees and encouraged to become employee shareholders at a time when such ideas were rare. His marketing and merchandising techniques were the forerunners of those employed by today's best creative retailers. Heal's Mansard Gallery displayed works by the most avant-garde artists of the time and he commissioned advertising and posters from the best graphic designers of the day. This frank study reveals previously unknown difficulties and failures as well as the successes of the man and his team. As a designer, and a founder of the Design and Industries Association, he was at the fore - front of industrial design, with a unit-furniture system, patented before World War One and another scheme for mass-produced, well-made furniture after that war, when aero - plane manufacturers sought to transfer to peace-time production. Yet it emerges that Heal's own Cabinet Factory remained a small craft workshop, with very limited machinery, mak - ing individual pieces of furniture by hand to the highest standards. The large number of illustrations in this book, combined with details of the factory's pro - duc tion from its opening in 1897 through to 1939, make it a valuable work of reference for anyone interested in twentieth-century furniture history or trying to identify a piece of early Heal's furniture. For the first time Ambrose Heal's design sketches are pub lished alongside illustrations taken from the original glass-plate negatives.

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