In 1991 he launched Mathew Hilton’s Balzac armchair, a bona fide icon. Pretty quickly though, Coakley was producing his own classics. I’m very grateful to all those dead designers, because they sponsored the new designs.’ Anyway, I fought them off and that helped me a lot. It wasn’t about the quality, it was about the margins. My things were either made by the same subcontractors or were the same quality as theirs. ‘We were able to sell a good-quality Corbusier chaise lounge to somebody who would never think of buying the official one. And I’m proud to say that a lot of them were knock-offs,’ he says. ‘When I started, what supported my own designs were the classics. The business was built on Coakley’s remakings of early modernist design classics. A year later he was showing the first designs of Matthew Hilton and Jasper Morrison – both now design superstars – at the Milan furniture fair.Īnd his new designs from Morrison and Hilton weren’t yet setting the world alight. Initially he planned to use his grandly shabby new shop to sell vintage furniture, but that year he visited the newly opened, Philippe Starck designed Café Costes in Paris and decided he would turn his hand to producing contemporary design instead. Peter Saville, a fan of Coakley’s reheated Bauhaus, designed the SCP logo in return for a few choice pieces. Coakley spotted the building while visiting his tubular-steel makers, housed in what is now designer Lee Broom’s space. In 1985, he set up shop (and Sheridan Coakley Products) in an old upholstery warehouse on Curtain Road in Shoreditch. He fancied being a photographer but started out dealing and then restoring early 20th-century furniture, mostly made from tubular steel, working out of a small workshop/shop on Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill (an area to which he would return almost 30 years later).
And even he wonders how that happened.Ĭoakley’s father was ‘in’ bubblegum, buying the UK Bazooka licence after the Second World War, but Coakley Jr was not much for confectionery. In some ways, you could argue that Sheridan Coakley pretty much is the British design industry.
Sheridan Coakley of Sheridan Coakley Products, better known as SCP, is now a grandee of the British design industry. He runs a business that once operated in the margins and is now dealing in the stuff of daytime TV shows, a new national drug (even if fully capitalising on that addiction still seems a good deal harder than logic suggests it should be). Sheridan Coakley has a shop that was once in the middle of nowhere and is now in the middle everything everything cool and happening, anyway. With his furniture brand SCP, Sheridan Coakley has become arguably the most significant product design patron in Britain right now.
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