INTERVIEW | Adam Thomas Design for all
A pioneer in accessible design, Adam Thomas has led the kitchen design agenda in the field for years resulting in him picking up the Special Achievement Award at last month’s kbbreview Retail & Design Awards. Andrew Davies went to meet him…
Q & A
Q: You’re acknowledged as the expert in your field, but how do you describe what your expertise is? A: My expertise, or at least my goal, is to keep people independent and in their own homes for as long as possible. I’ve experienced myself what it’s like not being able to do simple tasks and it’s incredibly infuriating. Can you imagine not being able to make a cup of tea for yourself? Or having to ask somebody to get something out of a cupboard or a drawer when you know you’re capable of doing it?
Q: What label do you use? A: For years it was called accessible design, and I specialised in that. More recently, I like to think I’m one of the founders of what’s called the ‘multigenerational’ movement. Accessible design was looking at a standard house that wasn’t accessible and making it accessible if the resident is a disabled person – so you rip out everything and start again. The multigenerational philosophy is that if you factor it in at the design and build stage of the property itself, then you should be able to be born in that house, live in that house and die in that house and it should suit your various needs throughout your life.
Q: When did your professional design journey start? A: I left school at 15 with O-levels in Art and Technical Drawing and I wanted to be a children’s book illustrator. So I started working on a friend’s farm doing calf rearing, hay baling or feeding the cows and the rest of the time I’d be drawing. As it happened, my first two art jobs were nothing to do with children’s’ books and the third was, guess what, designing a kitchen. I was just 16 and I turned up on my motorbike with very long hair and no portfolio and this incredible person gave me a plan and told me to draw what I thought it looked like in 3D. So I did and he offered me a job and I’ve worked with him now for 39 years – that was Richard Smithies at Design Matters. Only a year-an- a-half after that I had a motorbike smash and snapped my back. This was 1981 and Richard was incredible, as many would not have considered employing a disabled person back then – and he not only did, but also made the showroom fully accessible for me and we’ve carried on together ever since.
Q: Did you start designing accessible kitchens straight away? A: No, not at all. For 12 years or so after the injury, I was just learning the trade. But by that stage, I was getting more political and very cross with society. Back in the early 1990s, a disabled person had no basic human rights in this country – no
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say ‘can you imagine what’s it like to not be allowed on a bus’ and they think I’m talking about apartheid or something and I say ‘no, it was this country and it was disabled people’.
Q: Did that empathy start informing your work? A: Yes, absolutely no question. Richard at Design Matters let me take off one day a week to do voluntary work and I started working with a disability organisation and I ended up coordinating the civil rights campaign for disabled people. I did that for five years and met my wife there handcuffed to a bus. We were being shown loads of London show houses for new developments and I was whingeing that it was terrible and the design – particularly in the kitchens and bathrooms – was appalling. I went back to Richard and said ‘I’d like to set up a design service for older and disabled people’ – and he went for it.
Q: There was obviously a moral imperative to provide this service, but did you also identify a commercial gap in the market? A: Yes, absolutely. I have no issue making money out of disabled people as long as it’s done right. There are two things that annoy disabled people – firstly, as soon as anything is made for them, it virtually doubles in price, and secondly, they’re usually not designed very well in the first place. Disabled people don’t mind paying a good price, but what they want is to be able to go into a showroom and not have to start explaining everything from the beginning. Equally, they want the product to fit them, not the other way round. I still find it incredible that the kitchen industry hasn’t woken up to the fact that there is a massive market out there and it’s because it still looks at disabled people as poor and living on benefits – and that’s the small minority. The majority are working and earning money.
rights to an education, no rights for public transport, no rights for insurance, which meant you couldn’t drive. There were no rights to allow you access to public buildings, so I couldn’t legally be allowed to go to a cinema – I could be asked to leave as I was seen as a fire hazard.
Q: It’s amazing to even think that was ever the case… A: Yes, I meet disabled kids now who were born way after this and they aren’t even aware that it was like that. I used to do talks at schools and I’d
Q: And designing for this market is not just about wheelchair users, of course… A: Exactly, that’s the beauty of the multigenerational approach. You could design a kitchen that’s absolutely perfect for a wheelchair user, or visually-impaired person or whoever, but if the rest of the family can’t use it, then it’s a badly designed kitchen. The multigenerational kitchen is one everyone can use.
• Listen to the full interview in the Kitchen & Bathroom Design Podcast from April 2. Go to
podcast.kbbreview.com or search ‘kitchen and bathroom design’ in your podcast app
· April 2020
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