Stainless steel door handle designed by Kenneth Grange for izé workshop and retailed through Crown Hardware. Britain, 2001.

Polished stainless steel door handle consisting of two straight handles curving down at the ends, two circular brushed steel escutcheons with rubber inserts and two long screws which thread through each escutcheon and pass through holes drilled in the door.

Given by izé workshop.

Architectural Review Award, May 2001
Best New Product, Spectrum Design Show, 2001

Putting a New Handle on Excellence

Award-winning manufacturer Izé aims to provide ironmongery that is as much a pleasure for architects to specify as it is for clients to use. At the heart of the company's activities are the designs of respected British designer Kenneth Grange.

When The Architectural Review handed out its awards for the best designs at the Spectrum exhibition in London in May, designer Kenneth Grange was pleased that the judges looked at the products themselves rather than the designers. He felt that, with so much enthusiasm for the new, they would have been unlikely to give an award to a product whose designer was aged 70.

Yet Izé, producer of the winning Crown Grange Collection, is certainly new, a company that has been in existence for less than two years and is dedicated to the production of ironmongery with an architectural sensibility.

Judges of the AR award praised the company's cast stainless steel handles for 'the purity and functionality of design and the way it expressed the quality of the material'. This is a company that is certainly unusual, although in no way gimmicky.

Start with the name. Izé means something along the lines of 'thingy' in Hungarian. One of the three directors of the company, Edwin Heathcote, is of Hungarian origin. He is also an architect, a critic and writer, having written books on Imre Mackowecz and cinema architecture, editing Church Buildings and writing for the Financial Times. Not, then, the person one normally expects to set up an architectural ironmongery company.

Less surprising is Dave Bradshaw, who will shortly leave Dorma, one of the leading manufacturers of ironmongery. But he was the maverick there. A man with an encyclopaedic knowledge and a near photo- graphic memory of the ironmongery on every important building, he was the driving force behind the portfolio of designs that architect Birds Portchmouth Russum produced for Dorma (Open Door, September 2000). Now he is to become a director of Izé.

Being so interested in all aspects of architecture, Bradshaw likes to go to lectures. And it was at a lecture by Fred Manson on redevelopment of the South Bank that he met Grange. Both were keen to see Alsop's Peckham Library and went off there together. Now Grange, one of the best known and respected of British designers, is design director of Izé.

The activities of the company seem a bit diffuse, until you realise they all centre round one thing -the provision of excellent ironmongery, designed by architects or named designers, that will be a pleasure for the architect to specify and the client to use.

Grange has designed a collection for the company and, in addition, it is supplying handles by classic modern designers, many of them not previously available in the UK. It is also assembling collections of other objects by these same designers, in an attempt to break into the retail market. And it will work with specific architects with specific needs, either to have Grange design a handle for them, or to help them realise their own designs.

At the heart of this all are Grange's designs, sold, like all the handles, through Crown Hardware, so that they can become part of an overall ironmongery schedule. A founder partner of Pentagram, Grange has designed icons as diverse as the Intercity 125 and the Kenwood Chef. And, spookily, his very first project as an independent designer was designing handles for window manufacturer Henry Hope in Smethwick. But even without that experience, he would not have been fazed by architectural ironmongery. 'The technical bit is the easiest bit,' he says. 'I have done some funny things with so many people that you learn something about everything.' The important thing in any design, he says, is 'you need an angle, something to enthuse you. If you can find some sort of intelligence it can justify anything you do.' In the case of door handles, he thinks the story is that, 'the rose should be as much a part of the handle as it can be.' It is this, he thinks, that makes the classic D Line handles so satisfactory. 'The middle of the handle describes what the rose should be.' His own handles are somehow reassuringly solid without being at all heavy. The most appealing marches solidly forward from the rose, turns an angle and then the top edge swoops downward to form a front face that looks sharp but is very comfortable to hold. This is a piece of clever geometry that, like all the best ideas, seems utterly obvious. These are handles that will fit well in a contemporary design, not demand centre stage.

As a man who has always delighted in being close to manufacture, Grange is pleased that it is possible to investment cast the handles. 'Until recently,' he says, 'investment casting was wonderful and amazingly expensive. Now you can do commonplace things investment cast in stainless steel.'

Indeed, the manufacturing of Izé's handles is fascinating. They are made by a foundry in Essex, then finished by a firm in Walsall. Izé makes use of the small skilled companies that set up after the recession of the early '90s, with talented people working in scruffy surroundings able to service particular needs. They are reminiscent of the kind of manufacturers that sculptor Anthony Gormley found in the Newcastle area to help with the making of the Angel of the North.

'We can be very light-footed by dealing with these small makers,' says Heathcote, who believes that, as a result of the fallout from Britain's shrinking manufacturing base, a network of freelance manufacturing skills is building up that could one day rival the flexibility and skill of small Italian manufacturers.

If Grange is a big name in design, so are the other designers whose products Izé is offering. And there is an interesting hierarchy, to do with material costs and manufacturing techniques, which means that a Gropius handle, complete with ebonised grip, is an expensive, luxury item. Gaudi (and actually his handles from Casa Mila are quite restrained) is more affordable, and Siza is almost cheap. At present the company sells three Siza handles, but it hopes to put another one into production. There is a design that has been in existence for some time but has never been made. But Heathcote just walked into Siza's office one day and suggested putting it into production, and it looks as if this will happen.

Another lost handle is one designed by Max Burchartz for Lubetkin's Highpoint I and 2. This was originally made by a German company that vanished, but then another company found it had all the tooling, put the handle back into production, and it is now part of the Izé portfolio.

Back in the present day, the company is working with Burrell Foley Fischer to develop a handle for its project at the Royal Society based on the idea of a strand of DNA. It is also developing designs with Hudson Featherstone and with David Adjaye. Adjaye, who had developed his own ironmongery for private housing projects that he has done, is now keen to put those ideas into wider production so that they can be used both on his own commercial projects and sold to other specifiers. His handles, in a range of materials from wood to stainless steel are, he says, 'about geometry, preparation, the ability to have flexibility so you can make them disappear or appear.' Like other Izé handles they will be sold through Crown Hardware, and the plan is to launch them at 100% Design.

Izé has already completed the Sam Fogg Gallery in London's Covent Garden. Architect Zombary-Moldovan Moore specified the company's Wagenfeld handles. For the future, it is looking at expanding its own designs into pull handles, coat hooks and possibly bathroom furniture. After all, although it is difficult to decide what a thingy is, we all need a lot of them in our lives. How nice that they can be well designed.

Ruth Slavid
AJ Focus, September 2001, pp.35-6

Born in London in 1929, the industrial and product designer Kenneth Grange attended the Willesden School of Arts and Crafts there from 1944 until 1947. While serving in the Royal Engineers, Kenneth Grange trained as a technical draftsman. After freelancing for several London architecture and design practices, Kenneth Grange founded Kenneth Grange Design Ltd in 1958. Kenneth Grange worked mainly as a product designer; his chief clients were Kodak and Kenwood, makers of household electrical appliances. In 1960 Kenneth Grange designed the "Chef" line in mixers for Kenwood. For Kodak, Kenneth Grange designed the housing of the "Pocket Instamatic" camera in 1975. In 1972 Kenneth Grange joined Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, and Mervyn Kurlansky in founding Pentagram, an interdisciplinary design practice that now has twenty partners and maintains branches worldwide. In 1990 Kenneth Grange designed the Adshel bus stops for London Transport. In 2000 he restyled the London taxis. Since the 1970s Kenneth Grange has also had numerous commissions from Japanese firms and his work has greatly influenced Japanese product design. Kenneth Grange views product design not merely as a means to improving the appearance of objects but instead as an opportunity for innovation. Consequently, Kenneth Grange sees project design as an important part of the manufacturing process.

M.38:1-2001