The kbbreview Interview // Paul O’Leary
Paul O’Leary
To the outside world, deVOL is such a distinct company, but do you personally have a defined philosophy? Or is it all in your head? A bit of both probably. There’s certainly a traditional look to our furniture and even though there are various different ranges and styles, they all seem to have that in common. But it’s not just furniture, it’s the lifestyle. Rooms with character, full of things you’ve gathered to keep you company in your kitchen while you’re preparing food. Things that you love, things that put you in a good mood. The type of customers that are drawn to us are the ones that fully embrace the eclectic mix of antique and functional furniture. Helen is our creative director but her kitchen has only got one deVOL cupboard in it, the rest is an old kitchen table, an old glazed cupboard to keep crockery in, and an old work table to chop vegetables on - that is the deVOL look.
Let’s go back in time a bit. When did you first think of design as something that people did and that you could do? That’s a really nice question because when we did the TV show, I was surprised that a lot of young people were drawn to it. Watching the programme sowed seeds for them and I don’t know if anybody sowed that seed for me. I think my first experience of any type of design was helping my mum in the garden. I loved changing something dramatically like digging a pond and adding some crazy paving and a rockery. My parents were always broke so we had a load of post-war dark brown plywood furniture and they decided to get the kids to paint it gloss white. I quickly realised that painting was actually quite difficult so maybe that was a little seed too, I didn’t want to be that bad at something again.
When did the formal training start? I loved art at school. It was one of the subjects I could do so I went to art college at 17. The problem was that everybody was so much more talented than I was. They were all artists. They could draw, they could paint, they could sculpt and they were passionate and had ideas they wanted to express. I didn’t have any ideas and I quickly found out that
My advice for anybody who’s been running a business for years and feels like they’re barely making ends meet is just don’t give up
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I’m not an artist. It wasn’t until a couple of years later when I got into university to do industrial design that I was suddenly in my element. I’d been a lazy teenager but here I was focused.
That’s industrial design, where did the love of old furniture come from? Well, I didn’t love old furniture and traditional styling when I came out of university. When you do a course like that you imagine you’re going to be designing a kettle or a toaster that will end up in John Lewis. That was the aspiration, but actually when I finished I set up a design consultancy and offered our services to anybody who wanted them - which was pretty much nobody and we struggled to make ends meet. I found the clients quite scary too, I remember one came round because he wasn’t happy with the work and we all hid underneath the tables…
I’m sure they were very stylish tables though… You know what? They weren’t! My own taste didn’t really develop until I switched from a design consultancy to restoring antique furniture. When you do that you become aware of what a hand-cut dovetail from an 1850 chest of drawers looks like and how 1940s furniture is so different as they’re machined dovetails. They don’t have the character. The timber’s different. It’s got plywood in it. The grain isn’t as close together. It’s really soft, you can put your fingernail into the timber. Same for the
Peer-to-peer Kitchen design pioneer Charlie Smallbone became
a good friend of O’Leary after collaborating on a kitchen for the 2018 Chelsea Flower Show. We asked him what question he would put to Paul... Charlie: “At both Smallbone and Paris Ceramics, we did a significant proportion of our sales in the USA. How easy did you find it to establish deVOL there?” Paul: When I was starting in kitchens, I looked at people like Charlie who had fancy brochures and shops in nice towns and they were so far away from what we were. It was great to get to know him 20 years later and learn that his story was so similar to mine, starting out stripping antique pine furniture.
He opened a shop in New York and his Englishness and charm drew the American clients to him I think, but he’s got a little bit more bravado than I have, I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing that when I was in my twenties. When we finally went over there I think I’d got to a point in life where I just thought,
‘what the hell,
how amazing would that be?’. Everyone’s going to say: ‘Really? deVOL? That little company from Loughborough has opened a shop in New York?’ It made people think of our brand differently. It was just the sheer boyish excitement of the whole idea, it wasn’t something that a committee sat down and crunched the numbers on, I did it because it was ridiculous and because it was there.
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kbbreview
September 2024
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