Allegro dining suite

This elegant dining suite, comprising a table, chairs and a sideboard, was designed by Sir Basil Spence and manufactured by H Morris & Company of Glasgow around 1949.

Spence was born to Scottish parents in India and later trained as an architect in Edinburgh. He is famous for the design of Coventry Cathedral and the campus of Sussex University.

In 1946, Spence met Neil Morris, owner of H Morris and Company, when both men were involved in the landmark ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. In 1948, Morris approached Spence to design the Allegro dining furniture. The design won a first-class diploma from the Council of Industrial Design and examples of the chairs were donated to both the V&A and MoMA in New York.

Very few complete suites of Allegro appear to have been made, probably due to their high cost. However, the design of the chair, a technical tour-de-force comprising more than 100 mahogany and betula laminations, was particularly admired. The designer Ernest Race, writing in The Architects’ Journal, called it ‘truly contemporary in conception yet having much in common with the finest British work of the late eighteenth century’.

This well preserved example of the suite, by one of Scotland’s most celebrated modern architects, now joins the furniture collection of around 1,800 items at National Museums Scotland.