DESIGN CLASSIC: Bisley Multidrawer

Designer:

Frederick Charles Brown, 1958.

Details:

Multidrawer Units, £119.99 each for an eight-drawer design, Bisley.

An industrial classic, the Bisley multi-drawer steel cabinet has been organising our lives for decades. versatile and robust, it has been used everywhere from offices to warehouses, from London to LA, and showcased on screen from Happy Valley to Skyfall.

A specialist in steel work, Frederick Brown originally founded Bisley as a car-repair company, before moving into office furniture in 1948 after winning a contract to design a wastepaper bin. Ten years later, buoyed by the move to open-plan workspaces, the launch of the modular, powder-coated multidrawer, with its chrome handles and drawers of varying depth, firmly established the British brand’s reputation.

Thanks to the industrial trend and the popularity of cool home offices, the ‘Bisley’ – as it’s most commonly known – has been welcomed into the interiors world. Now updated in a palette of contemporary colours and made in a lightweight steel, it was recently listed as a design classic by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Not that it needed a stamp of approval – we’ve always been fans!