When, in 1971, David Hockney was asked to paint a portrait of the retiring chief executive of London’s Royal Opera House, he insisted the sitter come to his Notting Hill flat. The resultant picture, Portrait of Sir David Webster, shows the ailing mandarin in a Mies van der Rohe chair, set next to a glass table with tubular steel legs. Both pieces of furniture had been sold to Hockney by Zeev Aram, who had additionally designed the second.
Its subject apart, Hockney’s painting is a portrait of a time whose look Aram had helped to shape. His glass table, called Altra, had, by 1971, become a sine qua non of fashionable London drawing rooms. Aram, who has died aged 89, had designed it in 1967, exactly 40 years after Mies’s chair. Both had been displayed in the office-cum-showroom at 57 King’s Road, Chelsea, which he had opened in 1964. The King’s Road was at the heart of what was about to become Swinging London: Mary Quant’s Bazaar was a few doors down from Aram’s shop, Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell’s Quorum around the corner. In Hockney’s portrait of the last two, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971), Clark slouches in a Marcel Breuer chair, an Aram trademark.
Both Mies and Breuer had been at the Bauhaus, and it was the Bauhaus aesthetic that informed Aram’s eye. Born to Jewish hotelier parents, Palma and Aaron Ungar, in Cluj, Romania, he had been taken to what was then Mandatory Palestine in 1940 to escape antisemitism. Leaving boarding school on a kibbutz at 15, Ze’ev – “wolf” in Hebrew, pronounced “Zev” – had found work with an architect called Heinz Seelig, who was designing a restaurant in Tel Aviv for Aaron. Seelig had been at the Bauhaus. “I was just an odd-job boy, sharpening pencils and making tea,” Aram recalled. “But each evening Heinz would give me exercises in drawing and perspective. He taught me basic design, and it stayed with me.”
This architectural training was interrupted by national service in the new Israeli navy – Zeev changed his name at this time, from Ungar to Aram, to assimilate better into Israeli society – which led in turn to a seven-year commission. (Something of the sailor was to stay with Aram, who was short, broad-chested and walked with a rolling gait.)
In 1957, he met Elizabeth Bunzl, the English child of Viennese parents, who had come to Israel to work on a kibbutz. When Bunzl returned to London to study textiles at the Central School of Art – now Central Saint Martins – Zeev went with her. They married the following year. Graduating from Central in 1960 in furniture and interior design, Aram found work in the offices first of Ernö Goldfinger and then of Basil Spence.
Arriving in London, Aram said, he had known how to load a gun, but not how to mix paints. “I brought nothing from Israel in that line,” he laughed. “I only brought persistence, insistence and chutzpah.”.
If, by the early 1960s, the British had broadly been converted to modernism in architecture, they had yet to be won over in terms of decor. “People were driving smart cars and watching televisions,” Aram recalled, “but when they bought furniture, they wanted reproduction.” In part, this was due to a lack of choice. The odd Eames chair aside, London then was a desert of good modernist furniture. In January 1964, Aram travelled to Milan in search of just that. There, for the first time, he saw work by Breuer, and by the Italian designers Achille Castiglioni and Vico Magistretti. He quickly signed contracts for all three.
On 9 April, Aram Designs opened in Chelsea, its all-glass frontage and white-and-stainless-steel interior stopping passers-by in their tracks. “People were horrified by the furniture,” its gleeful founder recalled. “I used to sit in the Wimpy across the road to see their reactions.” When, on opening day, the American Vogue photographer Claude Virgin walked in and bought a Breuer Wassily chair, Aram was so taken aback that Virgin was forced to carry it home on his head. It was the shop’s last sale for three months.
This soon changed. Upstairs from the showroom was Aram’s small design office, producing interiors for an ever more bluechip clientele, furnishings often coming from the shop below. In 1965 came a commission for Simpsons of Piccadilly, a rare modernist landmark in central London. Aram’s curve-edged, white plastic fittings caught the 60s mood, drawing a younger clientele to what had become a rather stuffy gentlemen’s clothiers. Other corporate clients included the advertising giant J Walter Thompson, although Aram was not above taking on smaller, regional firms. There were private clients, too, including a down-at-heel man Aram mistook for a gas fitter but who turned out to be Victor Rothschild. “I opened the door, he looked around and told me to get in touch with his secretary,” Aram recalled. “We ended up designing his office and became good friends.”
By 1973, rents in Chelsea had mushroomed and the showroom grown too small. Aram moved his business to Kean Street in Covent Garden. When the ex-warehouse next door came up for sale in 1999, the shop expanded into that, too, finally moving to its current Drury Lane building in 2002. By now, the firm was sufficiently established for Aram to concentrate less on his own designs and more on other people’s. Scouring art school degree shows, he would invite students who caught his eye to exhibit in the firm’s third-floor gallery, underwriting all the costs himself and throwing launch parties at which champagne flowed. Among other beneficiaries of this largesse were Thomas Heatherwick and Jasper Morrison.
In 1973, too, Aram had met the Irish designer, Eileen Gray, then in her 90s and largely forgotten. When Aram asked if he could start manufacturing her designs, Gray assumed he was joking. These are now among the most successful of Aram’s products, most notably so the iconic E1027 side table. Asked, in 2014, what had been the proudest moment of his career, Aram answered: “Bringing back to life Eileen Gray.”
By that year, the 50th anniversary of his firm, Aram had been joined in business by two of his children, Ruth and Daniel. In 2014, too, he was made OBE.
Through it all, he remained pre-eminently a family man. If his business life was led in the West End, home was the sedate south London suburb of Wimbledon. The Edwardian Dutch house where the Arams raised their four children stressed comfort as much as style, although it did contain an impressive art collection. Not, however, a Hockney. When the painter bought his Altra table in 1971, he had offered to pay for it with a picture. Aram replied that, on the whole, he would rather have the cash. That the Hockney portrait in which his table appeared sold in 2020 for £12.9m amused him highly.
Ruth died in 2018. Aram is survived by Liz, their children Deborah, Karen and Daniel, and 10 grandchildren.
Zeev Aram, furniture designer and retailer, born 5 October 1931; died 18 March 2021
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