Leading English furniture designer whose work combined Scandinavian style with an Arts and Crafts influence
Ronald Carter, who has died of cancer aged 86, was the foremost furniture designer of his generation. He worked mainly in timber in a finely detailed, unmistakably English idiom. Users of the British Library, in London, sit gratefully cocooned in ultra-comfortable leather-seated chairs purpose-designed by him. He was also responsible for the handsome furniture in the Victoria and Albert Museum's cafe, once described as "an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached".
Ron was of that idealistic postwar generation that believed in design for the public good. Like his contemporaries Kenneth Grange and Terence Conran, he had been involved as a student in the Festival of Britain in 1951 and absorbed its excitement and hopes for raising standards of design in Britain. Though Ron, a notably self-deprecating man, might not have explained it in such solemn terms, his life as a designer and a maker was dedicated to the perfecting of the craft.
He was born into a coal-mining family in the Black Country. His mother was a dressmaker. His father left the mines to become a door-to-door salesman, selling ladies' fashions from the back of a van. As a boy, Ron showed promise in the crafts. He studied industrial and interior design at Birmingham Central College of Art, where he won an internal scholarship for silversmithing, before progressing to the Royal College of Art in London to specialise in furniture design. Under its energetic young principal, Robin Darwin, the RCA in the early 1950s was in a heady phase, imbued with a serious new purpose in training designers to revitalise British industry.
Ron's RCA professor Dick Russell was also chief designer for Gordon Russell Ltd, the family firm based in Broadway in the Cotswolds. Ron was his star pupil, working in the Russell tradition of fine craftsmanship, subtly blending modernism and the English Arts and Crafts. He enjoyed those student years, working with Dick on the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion at the Festival of Britain. He shared what he later called "a very scruffy flat" with my husband-to-be, David Mellor, who shared his love of making. They built an Enterprise sailing dinghy together. Ron always loved the sea and fishing was his favourite relaxation.
Even when he was a student, Ron's furniture was noticed. One of his chairs was selected by the rector for the new RCA senior common room. Another was chosen by the architect Frederick Gibberd for the new London airport at Heathrow. This was the chair that appears in David Hockney's lithograph Mirror, Mirror on the Wall.
Ron left the RCA with a first-class degree and the silver medal for special distinction. He then won a travel scholarship to the US, sailing in the Queen Mary in unaccustomed luxury and working for a year as a staff designer for Corning Glass on Fifth Avenue, New York.
He was well placed on his return to Britain to set up his own furniture design consultancy. Unlike Robin Day, the best-known British designer of the previous generation, Ron was relatively unaffected by American styling and technological experimentation. He preferred to work in timber, developing an anglicised equivalent of Scandinavian modern. Through the 60s, Ron, then in partnership with his RCA contemporary Robert Heritage, worked for companies such as LM Furniture, Gordon Russell and the Stag Cabinet Company. The long, low, timber sideboard became a kind of theme tune, now once again in favour with collectors of mid-century "contemporary" design.
Meanwhile, Ron kept up his RCA connections as an influential tutor in the furniture department. His students over the next 20 years included Fred Scott, Jane and Charles Dillon, Peter Murdoch, Floris van den Broecke, Rupert Williamson and Fred Baier, most of the famous names in British furniture design. He was made an honorary fellow of the college on his retirement in 1974.
The 1980s were Ron's glory days. He had by now become disenchanted with working for industry as a design consultant and wanted to be more directly in control of the manufacturing of his own designs. In 1980, with Peter Miles as business partner, he established a new company, Miles Carter, employing a workforce of 20 skilled cabinet makers at Wirksworth in Derbyshire.
"I make furniture that is simple but complicated enough to have its own personality," said Ron. His designs for Miles Carter have some of the robustness of rough-hewn Tudor furniture, but the detail is sophisticated in the manner of the Arts and Crafts maestros Baillie Scott, CFA Voysey, Ernest Gimson and Ernest and Sidney Barnsley.
It is furniture with a quality of classiness that caused it to be specified for most of the top contracts of the early 1980s: Heathrow Terminal 4; the BBC chairman and director general's offices; several embassies and diplomatic residences; the British Museum and the V&A.
The commission for furniture for the British Library came through the architect Colin St John Wilson whose ideas for the seating were inspired by the painting of Saint Jerome, patron saint of scholars, by Antonello da Messina in the National Gallery. In the painting, Saint Jerome sits at his desk in a curved chair, totally focused on the work in hand. The challenge for Ron was to provide a similar individual "workspace" for each reader within the larger public workspaces of the reading rooms. He achieved this by designing a heavy oak curved chair with its own optional footstool. This robust and lovely furniture will stand the test of time.
Ron was made a royal designer for industry and, in 1999, was appointed OBE. Unlike many of his design contemporaries, he resisted the lure of celebrity. Writing in the Guardian in 1998, Jonathan Glancey summed up the quality of reticence that made Ron so remarkable both as a designer and as a man: "This quiet designer is never seen in fashion mags. He does not wear difficult glasses. He does not say 'yah'. He is neither cool nor hot."
In 1952 Ron married Marilyn Clement, an American he met when they shared an apartment block in New York and she was working for Vogue magazine. They returned to London where they and their three daughters, Michele, Carol and Ruth, lived a sociable family life in a beautiful early Victorian house overlooking Clapham Common. It was an upbringing in which visual things mattered and all the children absorbed this influence.
In the early 1970s Ron left his family to live with and later marry Ann McNab, a primary school teacher and maker of papier-mache objects. He and Ann went to live in Leigh-on-Sea. After Ann's death seven years ago, Ron – missing the buzz of London exhibitions and museums – returned to south London to live on the same street as Michele.
In his old age, failing in health, he made an astonishing return to the jewellery making of his early days in Birmingham. His sense of craftsmanship and structure and sheer joyfulness in making remained intact.
He is survived by Marilyn and his daughters.
• Ronald Louis Carter, furniture designer, born 3 June 1926; died 22 May 2013