Cherrill Scheer

With roots in the furniture sector dating back to 1907 when her grandfather founded the Hille furniture company, and 50 years in the business herself, Cherrill Scheer continues to champion designers and encourage students

For Cherrill Scheer, grand dame of the British contract furniture industry, there was never any soul searching about what to do for a living. Scheer is the daughter of the hugely influential Ray Hille who, in 1932 developed the Hille furniture company, and so she grew up surrounded by design and the factory environment. ‘My mother never had anywhere else to put me,’ says Scheer, ‘so I was practically brought up in the woodwork and furniture factory.

‘We were so immersed as a family in talking to architects and designers that it seemed almost automatic for me to study architecture.’

It’s hard to imagine now what a huge influence the Hille manufacturing family had in the UK over the newly emerging contract market in the Fifties, and in what reverence they were held by architects and designers. Hille products are now found all over the world and are in public collections including those in New York and London.

Founded in 1907 by Scheer’s grandfather Salamon Hille, a Russian emigrant who had little experience of the furniture industry but a great appreciation of ‘fine things’, the Hille furniture company began by specializing in restoration and repair.

But Salamon’s daughter Ray was a moderniser. ‘My mother always wanted to use the latest materials and have the latest designs,’ says Scheer. Ray Hille had designed art deco furniture, some of which is now in theV&A Museum, but the company’s move from specialising in traditional domestic furniture to modern pieces for the contract sector came about in 1948, when Scheer’s sister Rosamund Julius attended the International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

‘The joint winners in the storage section were [British designers], Robin Day and Clive Latimer, who they didn’t know,’ says Scheer, ‘and they came back and made it their business to get to know them.’

Day, who with his wife, the late textile designer Lucienne, is the subject of a recent film celebrating their joint achievements in post war Britain, by Murray Grigor and Hamid Shams, was to become a central figure in the Hille business.

Among Day’s designs for Hille is the Polyproylene chair, which catapulted Hille into the forefront of contract design and is still in production.

Scheer studied at the Architectural Association and Kingston School of Architecture. ‘I never finished,’ she says, ‘because by my fourth or fifth year I had become so involved with Hille.’

She joined the family business full time in 1961, working her way through different departments including manufacturing. The design briefings and exhibitions were what interested her most.

One of Scheer’s first brainwaves at Hille was to run a scholarship for design students. ‘I went around the design shows and I would select four of five students who I thought were really good, and we’d invite them to come and develop their products with us,’ she says.

Among those to be given their first break by Hille were Roger Dean, the artist, graphic designer and architect who Scheer remembers designing ‘a lovely sea urchin chair’, Ray Wilkes, who went on to work with Herman Miller in the USA, and Peter Murdoch.

Halfway through the development of his product, Murdoch was offered the job of designing graphics for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. He asked if a close friend of his, in his second year at the RCA, could follow it through for him. That friend turned out to be another hugely gifted British furniture designer Fred Scott.

Scott, like Day, came from High Wycombe, a town famous for its chair manufacturing industry. ‘They had both worked on the factory floor before they went to college, so they weren’t too proud to listen to those men getting their hands dirty,’ says Scheer.

As well as an eye for up-and-coming designers, Scheer had a gift for marketing and in 1963, put this into practice with the Day’s Polypropylene stacking chair. ‘We sent a postcard out to the big government buyers with a line drawing of a stork with a small bundle in its beak, saying “Look out for a small parcel”. Then we sent a parcel with the smallest of the chair’s five models inside and a questionnaire asking what they though of the size, colour and materials.’ The Polypropylene went on to become the world’s biggest selling chair, and Scheer became Hille’s marketing director in 1970. In 1983 Hille was sold to Ergonom and, after it changed hands again, Scheer went to work for Scott Howard office furniture before setting up her own public relations and marketing consultancy, Cherrill Sheer and Associates, in 1991.

A chance meeting led to her landing the job of organising the 1993 Design Renaissance exhibition in Glasgow. ‘It was a huge, Olympics-style thing held every six years,’ she says, and I thought I would just be organising the speakers, but I ended up having to do some of the fundraising, too. I’d never done anything like that – at Hille we gave money, we didn’t ask for it. So I thought, well, I can do anything now.’

After almost 50 years working in the furniture industry, Scheer is still as passionate as ever. Her company works with architects, interior designers furniture designers, and manufacturers including KI, for which, she says, ‘I do a bit more than just PR’. CSA client lists also includes architecture practices The Penson Group, The Interiors Group and Scott Brownrigg Interior Design.

Scheer is still as active in the design industry as ever, dedicating much of her spare time to voluntary work, promoting design awareness, architecture and the development of design education.

She’s also involved with Bucks Furniture Forum because, she says, ‘I can’t keep away from the furniture industry’, as well as helping out with the Design Guild Marks and serving as an adviser to FX and the FX Awards.

‘As long as it’s connected to design, art or furniture I want to be there,’ Scheer says.



This article was first published in FX Magazine.








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