This article is part of our Design special report previewing Milan Design Week.
Ask nearly anyone with any kind of tenure in the design industry about Established & Sons, and their first response is likely to be the same: “I remember the parties.”
For a brief but intense period following its creation in 2005, the English design company generated an exceptionally high volume of buzz. Certainly this was a credit to its envelope-pushing furniture and fixtures, produced in collaboration with a large stable of boldfaced designer names, including Konstantin Grcic, Amanda Levete and Sebastian Wrong, one of the brand’s founding partners. Yet it was also, without question, a product of Established & Sons’s fabulous, celebrity-studded evening affairs.
A quick spin through the event-photography archives tells the tale. Zaha Hadid with Alasdhair Willis, a co-founder of the company, who is married to Stella McCartney, at the launch party in London. Scarlett Johansson at the first anniversary party in 2006. Gwyneth Paltrow at the company’s gallery opening in 2007.
“A lot of authoritative people at the time said we were too extravagant, too indulgent,” recalled Mr. Wrong. “It should be noted that those people were always in attendance.”
Above all, there was one place where fans and critics of the brand were sure to turn up: in Milan, during the city’s sprawling Salone del Mobile trade fair, where the company first exhibited the year after its debut and where it maintained a consistent presence into the late 2010s.
Now, nearly two decades since it arrived, Established & Sons is back in town — albeit in a very different form and in a much-changed design-world context.
This spring, the company announced a new partnership with a pair of major corporate investors, intended to give Established & Sons a full commercial reset.
“We had a number of suitors,” said Steve McGuire, a former Established & Sons managing director, who is staying on as a board member under the new leadership “We needed somebody who understood our DNA, what makes us tick.”
Long in the works, the addition of the new stakeholders — Global Design Distribution, or G.D.D., in Shanghai, which helps high-end furniture manufacturers find markets, and JNBY, a billion-dollar fashion conglomerate in Hangzhou, China — already appears to have injected vitality into the brand. This week, at a small venue in the Brera district, Established & Sons is marking its 20th anniversary with its first installation in Milan since before the pandemic.
“It’s a gentle launch, but we’re going to keep building,” said Pol Mauri, the company’s creative lead and an employee since 2017. Modest in scale, and aimed at a fairly limited professional audience, the Established & Sons collection on view this week in the Urban Hive hotel comprises older work from the brand’s salad days — Philippe Malouin’s modish Mollo chair from 2014, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s ultraplush Quilt seating from 2009 — and two recently commissioned pieces that signal the fresh start upon which the company is looking to embark.
From the Japanese-born, New York City-based designer Nao Tamura comes the Tiki lamp, with a conical base that supports a shade of unmistakably birdlike aspect, white and black and not a little Hitchcockian. On a lighter note, the Gelato lamp is a playful, suitably tasty-looking fixture whose cartoony hues and contours seem straight out of Italy’s Radical design movement of the 1960s.
In fact, they are. Originally conceived more than half a century ago, the revamped Gelato emerged from Mr. Mauri’s chance encounter (in Milan, naturally) with the work of the now 89-year-old designer Carlo Nason, whose catalog quickly fired the imagination of the Established team. (Tiki is also an update, of a product Ms. Tamura introduced in 2015.)
“We fell in love with everything, but we had to choose what we thought would work best,” Mr. Mauri said.
In addition to its obvious visual appeal, the lamp’s technical particulars could be readily tailored to the needs of 21st-century sourcing and production. In combining the nostalgic with the contemporary, Established & Sons is living up to the premise contained in its name, a commitment to mixing new and old that has distinguished the brand from the beginning.
Production and sourcing, on the other hand, were not previously known to be among the company’s strong suits.
Established & Sons burst on the scene when Mr. Wrong and his fellow designers Mr. Willis, Mark Holmes and Tamara Caspersz (originally director of business development) joined forces with Angad Paul. A businessman and sometime film producer, Mr. Paul was also the heir to a steel-manufacturing fortune. Ms. McCartney made the connection.
“All five are 36, photogenic and at similar life stages,” observed the Times of London, shortly after Established made its initial splash. With help from Mr. Paul’s seed financing, the brand hosted spectacles in Milan, often at the city’s La Pelota athletic facility, featuring eye-catching work like Jasper Morrison’s austere Crate furniture and Barber Osgerby’s beguiling, polychrome Iris tables.
But the momentum stopped in 2015, after setbacks at the Paul family firm reportedly drove its energetic scion into a state of severe depression. Mr. Paul died from a fall from his London penthouse balcony that November, in what authorities ruled was a suicide.
In the ensuing interval, Established & Sons struggled to regain its footing. Under a deal overseen by Vincent Frey, a French design entrepreneur, a new ownership consortium took control of the company in late 2016.
Months later, Mr. Wrong, who had departed in 2012, returned to help right the ship. Doing so would require no small amount of effort: By the time of Mr. Paul’s death, the brand had reportedly accumulated shareholder debt amounting to more than £15 million (more than $29 million today).
“The company was facing a lot of difficulties getting back on its feet,” said Ramzi Wakim, a Swiss investor who took a majority stake as part of the 2016 shake-up. “We had to streamline and restructure.”
Part of that meant trying to manufacture things the company could practically make and that people would reliably buy. Ms. Hadid’s Aqua table, for example, had an uneven surface and retailed for £40,000 ($51,517). Following its Salone-week debut, the product did sell out its limited-edition run, and it helped touch off a vogue for “starchitect”-designed furniture that seemed to confirm Established & Sons’s status as aesthetic pioneers.
Yet in hindsight, much of the company’s output under its previous leadership points to what Mr. McGuire calls a “money-is-no-object approach,” as opposed to one focused on fabricating, shipping and selling usable objects.
One pandemic, a number of Brexit-related disruptions and a few more staff switches later (Mr. Wrong left again two years ago, this time for the office-design specialists Orangebox), and today Established & Sons is ready to show that it has learned the fundamentals.
The addition of the two Chinese backers could give the company access to resources and clients that were previously out of reach, building on a longstanding distributor relationship with G.D.D. that grew to include the multinational JNBY as a major buyer, with about 2,000 stores.
For Xiao Lu, who co-founded G.D.D. with her husband, Yu Wang, uniting with the English brand was an opportunity for the American-educated couple to pair their enthusiasm for international design with their connections in East Asia and their grasp of its regional economy.
When G.D.D.’s board was choosing between different prospective partnerships, Ms. Lu said, “Everyone voted for Established & Sons.”
In a competitive global marketplace, the change in direction certainly appears to demonstrate Established & Sons’s eagerness to cast aside its prodigal image in favor of a leaner, smarter approach to the design business. The glittering La Pelota of the past is very different from the current understated space, and the new pieces being shown there evince at least some of the maturity that Mr. Mauri said the company now possesses.
At the same time, all parties seem to agree that the wild spirit of the enterprise must be preserved if the new venture is to succeed. It was an imperative that colored the decision to rejoin the Salone festivities.
“If there’s one place you have to be, it’s Milan,” Mr. Wakim said. “That’s where it all started.”