John Makepeace Prize for Innovation – £3k prize for winning designer

Photograph shows John Makepeace OBE

The Furniture Makers’ Company drives high standards within the industry, recognising and rewarding excellence with its Design and Bespoke Guild Mark awards.

We have now partnered with Britain’s best known designer and furniture maker, John Makepeace OBE, who is sponsoring the annual John Makepeace Prize for Innovation to encourage more radical concepts.

New for 2016, this £3000 cash prize for the winning designer seeks to encourage innovation that exploits new possibilities in design, materials and manufacture.

The prize will celebrate the achievement of the designer selected from those awarded a Bespoke or Design Guild Mark, or who have won a Wood Award in any one year.

The 2016 Innovation Prize is open to Design Guild Mark entrants for the next awards in May 2016, those awarded Bespoke Guild Marks between March 2015 and March 2016, and those shortlisted in the Furniture category of the 2015 Carpenters’ Company Wood Awards.

The John Makepeace Prize for Innovation will be judged in March 2016 by an independent panel of judges from the design and furnishing industries.

John Makepeace said: “As a designer and a maker, I am constantly trying to evolve more eloquent concepts for furniture. My objective is to achieve freer, lighter, stronger and more sculptural forms better suited to their function and more expressive of what is particular to each commission.

“I have always been fascinated by the interplay of design and technology, exploring processes and materials leading to new possibilities and creating products for current and future generations.”

Master of The Furniture Makers’ Company David Dewing said: “We are excited about this initiative to drive innovation in the field of furniture design and hope this new prize will prove a real incentive to designers, encouraging new ways of thinking and working with radical concepts, materials and new technologies.

“British design and manufacture is among the very best in the world and we welcome bold thinking to keep our industry ahead of its competitors.”

John’s own career to date has been described as an adventure in wood. As a teenager he visited the great cabinet-makers in Copenhagen. His early products were sold through Heals, Liberty’s and then in volume by Habitat. With design recognition came commissions for Kodak, Portals, Boots plc and Grosvenor Estates.

The College he set up at Parnham alongside his own workshops educated a generation of designers and furniture makers. Multi-disciplinary research for the new woodland campus at Hooke Park pioneered the more efficient use of forest produce and innovative construction techniques. He now works with a small team on British and international commissions.