Ercol’s Beginnings

Ercol founder Lucian Ercolani was born in San Angelo, Vado, Italy, the son of a woodcarver. The family came to Britain with the support of the Salvation Army in 1898. Lucian studied at the Shoreditch Technical Institute and became a freelance furniture designer and draughtsman. In 1910 he moved to High Wycombe to work for furniture maker Frederick Parker, who would later partner with Willi Knoll to become Parker-Knoll. Ercolani was then moved to Gomme’s furniture factory (which would become G-Plan) before setting up his own company. Named ‘Furniture Industries Limited’, Ercolani opened the company with twenty men in 1920.

He was very much an outsider in the Wycombe trade and raised most of his finance from contacts outside of the town’s industry. This probably influenced him to challenge established practices, and his factory was a distinct contrast to others. The building was deliberately laid out on one floor in a quarter-mile long building off the London Road, when most factories at the time typically had two storeys – a lot of factories were set up in people’s back gardens, so a building’s footprint often had to be small. Having everything spread across a single floor likely streamlined and sped up production. Other innovations included putting the machine belts below the floor for safety, minimising risk of injury to workers from fast-moving parts.

A Growing Business

Furniture Industries Limited made steady progress and gained a reputation for good quality work, rebranding as ‘Ercol’ in the mid-1930s. The company’s pre-World War Two designs followed the pattern of other large Wycombe companies. They produced furniture based on hybrids of antique and modernist elements. Catalogues from the 1930s show a range of furniture from oak sideboards, heavy dark oak cabinets, pine suites, round upholstered chairs, and recliners with deep cushions. ‘We were taking great care not to be too original’ Ercolani recalled, speaking of their early designs.

In 1934, Ercolani bought one of the oldest local businesses, Walter Skull & Son, who manufactured straight period reproduction furniture, and some new interpretations of Windsor designs. They continued to run Skulls as an independent brand producing its own designs until the 1950s.

Design Innovation

Ercolani had developed a distinct ideology based on his ideas of craftsmanship and his admiration for 16th – 18th century English antique furniture. The ‘Old Colonial’ range was supposedly based on 17th-century American furniture that Ercolani had seen on a visit to New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1923, although the range did not emerge until around the Second World War.

However, Ercolani’s most important innovation was the decision to make an updated version of the iconic Wycombe-made Windsor chair. Together with the Furniture Research Laboratory at Princes Risborough, Ercol developed a way of steaming elm so that it could be bent – an innovation which opened the way to mass machine-production of the Windsor and a modernisation in its design. This fitted in with Ercolani’s belief that his furniture should be both craftsmanlike and affordable, and led to an overwhelming emphasis on the virtue of solid wood. This was not always commercially advantageous. The ‘Chairmaker’s Chair’, is a modernised Windsor high-back armchair design with sweeping arm-bow. It is an Ercol design classic that is still made – it remains a prestige piece rather than a profitmaking one. John Mayes, curator of Wycombe Museum from the late 1940s thought it one of the most elegant chairs ever made.

Ercol were progressive with their working methods. The directors regularly visited trade shows and brought in new machinery. The company was one of the first to introduce computers to ease the strain on its sales and production operations. When computer-aided production became available in the late 1980s, Ercol were the first furniture company in Britain to use it. However, the company did not abandon its more old-fashioned paternalistic management style until it had to. No redundancies were ever made until conditions in 1990 made a clear-out necessary, and long-established traditions such as the annual Day Out to Bournemouth – a relic of the work practices of the 1930s – lasted even beyond that.