This toast rack is a modern replica in stainless steel, made by Alessi s.p.a.of Italy, of a design of 1878, originally by Christopher Dresser for Hukin & Heath of Birmingham.

Christopher Dresser was appointed art adviser to the established Birmingham manufacturing silversmith and electroplating firm of Hukin & Heath (founded 1855) in about 1878, the date the first of his designs were registered by the company. The firm specialised in novelty items for the luxury market and they were anxious to find a new direction. In 1879 they set up a London showroom at 19 Charterhouse Street, round the corner from the Dresser and Holme warehouse, and exhibited the new designs there. In the same year the firm entered a mark at Goldsmiths’ Hall. A report in the Furniture Gazette on 23 August 1879 marked Dresser’s arrival: ‘The Firm have secured the services [of Dr. Dresser] in order to be reliable in point of design.’ Dresser’s strikingly original designs were stamped with a facsimile of his signature in addition to the firm’s maker’s mark. Fortunately, Dresser’s designs were registered at the Patent Office, since the firm’s design books, in which they were also recorded, were destroyed in the 1950s.

Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) was one of the most distinguished graduates of the Government School of Design in the 19th century. He was the first independent industrial designer in the sense that he worked for a large and varied number of manufacturers. In his long career, as well as supplying designs for silver, plate, furniture, ceramics and glass, Dresser was also a prolific designer of textiles, carpets and wallpapers for leading firms such as Warner & Sons, Crossley & Co. and Jeffrey & Co. among many others. He also designed cast iron for the Coalbrookdale Company. Dresser’s grounding in botany whilst still a student encouraged his adoption of an analytical, systematic and quasi scientific approach to such topics as colour and proportions. His moral objection to dishonesty in design is a common cause with many Victorian design theorists including A.W.N. Pugin whose work Dresser admired. He also advocated refinement of finish and was fully attuned to the needs of machine production. Some of Dresser’s metalwork, such as this toast rack exhibits strikingly rigorous and stark forms, in astonishing prefigurement of the Bauhaus manner but his style is better understood as an extreme version of High Victorian Aestheticism.