Over the last 35 years, Luke Hughes has developed a wide range of ingenious, efficient, robust and proven engineering techniques to enable communal dining halls to reconfigure or fold and clear away their furniture.
The needs of a Great Dining Hall
Communal dining Halls increasingly need tables which can be reconfigured or folded and cleared away to accommodate informal luncheons, formal dinners, buffet receptions as well as wedding parties, theatrical and musical events.
They also need long lasting stacking chairs that enhance the interior. For example, these stacking chairs, designed exclusively for Churchill College, Cambridge.
Luke Hughes has designed chairs and tables for more than 30 communal dining halls, and refectories - from Henry VIII's Tudor palace at Hampton Court to the Gothic Revival interior of St John's College, Cambridge; from the striking modernist architecture at Churchill College, or Yale NUS, to the Arts and Crafts environment of Newnham College.
You will be pleased to know that the Newnham chairs are standing up superbly to the rigours of college life and, 23 years on, still look like new. They are a great testament of the skills and workmanship of your team.
Dame Patricia Hodgson, Principal, Newnham College, Cambridge
The key to our approach is designing the furniture to match the architecture thus making it easy for those who have to manage the building to rearrange it.
Enjoy the article? Delve deeper into Luke Hughes & Company’s place in the Arts and Crafts tradition with the fascinating new book 'Furniture in Architecture' . Available through Thames & Hudson
