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DESIGN ARCHIVES

ROBERT

WELCH

The British product designer
worked to make exceptional
homewares accessible to all

Words Catherine Coyle
Photography courtesy of Robert Welch Design archive

FEW DESIGNERS COME UP

a product that is so useful and so admired that it is still
being made and sold 50 years down the line. Robert
Welch’s RW2 cutlery (previously known as the Alveston
set, after the village near Stratford upon Avon where
he lived) has achieved this feat. It is simple, beautiful
and practical – the epitome of Welch’s style, in fact,
encapsulating the ethos and motivation behind this
progressive British designer.
“He was involved in an extraordinary era of design
revolution,” says his daughter Alice who, along with her
brother Rupert, now manages the family business Robert
Welch Designs, which still operates from their father’s
studio in Gloucester shire. “He and his contemporaries
– David Mellor, Terence Conran, Lucienne Day, Mary
Quant – were breaking with tradition and creating
something that Britain had not seen before in terms of
materials, form and, most importantly, accessibility.
“The 1950s and ’60s were eras of great experi-
mentation and rule-breaking,” Alice continues, “Such
dramatic changes will probably not be seen again. The
opportunity for newness and the appetite for change were
particular to those times.”
Welch was not a designer who was simply tapping
into a trend or moulding his work around prevailing
fashions. His motivation was deeply embedded and, in
many ways, can be traced back to childhood. His father,
a Navy man, was an amateur woodworker, and

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