The kbbreview Interview // Paul O’Leary
styles - does it look squat? Does it look elegant? Has it got round, ugly bulbous feet or stylish feet? You start to notice every detail and you can’t help but fall in love with the people who made it. You’re in awe of their skill because every single saw cut is there for you to see. So when you find yourself designing your own, without realising it you start drawing things that have the proportion, detail and characteristics of all of that traditional furniture. So that’s where it came from. It didn’t come from university, it didn’t come from my childhood. It came from restoring antique furniture. It was a simple stroke of luck.
Surely design moves on though, isn’t it about interpreting traditional tastes for the modern customer? For me, it’s about what’s right and what’s wrong. So for example, if you were to design a drawer that was two metres wide, that’s wrong. That’s a very ungainly drawer and would be very difficult to keep running smoothly. Then, of course, if it’s a narrow drawer it only needs one knob in the middle. If it’s a wider drawer, then two knobs would be right. But how wide does it need to be before you need two knobs? And how far apart should those knobs be? You find that out by looking at old furniture because it was made like that for hundreds of years and it’s familiar in your head. I think our designs are right and if we thought it would look better if it was a couple of inches wider, we would’ve made it a couple of inches wider.
I really enjoyed your TV show as the laid-back aesthetic of it showed the personality of deVOL so well. How much control did you have? The truth is that we were very nervous to do the TV show because clearly this is our business and if the show was naff it would be bad for us. There’s a lot of bad makeover shows where everything’s botched, slapped on, and stuck with double-sided tape that will last for five minutes. That’s obviously the very opposite of what deVOL is. So we wanted it to be really genuine. We wanted to show the antique shopping, all the designing and how it actually happens. We didn’t want a quick before shot, an after shot and some happy customers going, ‘wow, I love it’. TV’s really hard though, it takes it out of you. We’re proud of it and it’s definitely been good for us, but it’s so draining. I don’t know how Kevin McCloud does it year after year.
I think deVOL comes across as a very genuine labour of love and that’s really authentic. No, you can’t fake it. I was really pleased because when we started doing the show I was worried people would think we’re a bit above our station with showrooms in London and New York. A carpenter who’s got a workshop in his garage making bits of furniture and doing the odd garden gate and fitted wardrobe would hate us and think ‘it’s all right for them, they’ve got these fancy showrooms’. So I was really intent on talking about when we were broke for 15 years and couldn’t pay the rent. I want people to know that success is always possible. My advice for anybody who’s been running their business for years and
feels like they’re barely
making ends meet is just don’t give up. Just because you haven’t been successful in the first 15 years doesn’t mean you can’t be successful in the next. kbbr
September 2024 kbbreview
Listen to the full interview with Paul O’Leary in an upcoming episode of The kbbreview Podcast.
Helen Parker, Robin McLellan and Paul O’Leary
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