Why Hawker not only made fighter-bombers but also made dressing tables

2023-06-11 16:07:57

cultural Hawker Aircraft

The English fighter-bomber company that also made dressing tables

As of 4:07 p.m | Reading time: 2 minutes

Light and manoeuvrable, thanks to aluminium: Hawker Hurricane

Quelle: Hulton Archive/Charles E. Brown/Royal Air Force Museum/Getty Images

Hawker Aircraft supplied aircraft for the Royal Air Force in the 1930s and 1940s. But the UK lightweight designers had another, more style-conscious clientele.

In the 1920s, building construction, but above all automobile and aviation construction, dealt extensively and very successfully with the development of lightweight constructions. Aluminum has been the preferred (expensive) material of choice for many. The English company Hawker Engineering, founded in 1920, recognized the potential of the light metal.

From 1933 the company (now trading as Hawker Aircraft) turned its attention exclusively to aircraft construction for the military, with a limited number of private aircraft for travel and business use (as private jets were then called). The models “Hurricane” and “Typhoon” are the most famous Hawker fighter planes – used by the Royal Air Force – of the company, which merged differently until 1970.

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The extremely light-weight cabin interior made of ingeniously processed aluminum took on its own department. Here they also thought beyond the aircraft cabin: Hawker not only manufactured the famous Zeppelin cabinet, a closed piece of furniture for the airship’s wardrobe weighing only seven kilos, but also a half cabinet and a wonderfully curved make-up table, elegant and highly polished with a round mirror and bakelite fittings.

Hawker aluminum toilet table, circa 1940

Source: NEUMEISTER

Initially, the pieces were intended for bedroom interiors on Royal Air Force bases. The design, which is somewhere between Art Deco and Futurism, quickly found favor in the luxury segment for extravagant private buyers with a sense for top-class craftsmanship.

The furniture, most of which was individually commissioned with smooth, homogeneous surfaces without visible connecting elements, documents the streamlined shape that was popular in the 1930s in combination with the pronounced affinity for technology of an avant-garde-minded elite.

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It goes without saying that the interior fittings of the cupboards are minimalistic and functional, and the drawers of the chest of drawers glide smoothly, given the high standards of the metalworking specialists. The Auction house Neumeister in Munich, for example, the iconic Hawker toilet table is going up for 3,000 euros in the antiques auction on June 28, 2023. The cabinet is valued at 4000 euros, the half cabinet at 1000 euros.

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