As a design and communications agency, it earns its living transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, whether it be for a product launch, exhibition stand, new visitor attraction or an interpretation project at a heritage site. I guess it’s fair to say that it has also played its part in the growing presence of Brand Experiences - Autostadt in Germany being a prime example - providing an interface between client and customer. In these areas, the team at Furneaux Stewart has matched creative skills with technical expertise to create events that exploit the growing sophistication of lighting, audio, AV and display technology. They are your original alchemists, although they rarely start with base metal, as the client list will attest.
Design directors John Furneaux and Laurie Stewart are both graduates from the Royal College of Art, though they didn’t know each other at the time. After leaving the RCA in the early seventies, they established their own companies - Stewart founded a graphics agency, whilst Furneaux set up a 3D company specialising in the creation of ‘environments’. Their paths eventually crossed, and the two found themselves working jointly on a project; it wasn’t too long before it became clear that linking 2D to 3D would provide a template for a new kind of company, and thus Furneaux Stewart was born.
Although always a fluid business, it is in recent years that it has seen real dynamic growth and through the addition of new members and new skills to the team (including commercial director Nick Matthews, architectural director Ray Hole, new media director Adrian Little, the aforementioned Nick Swallow as communications director and Caroline Buchanan as business development manager), it has won major contracts the world over, not just for its skills in architecture or design, but also for its ability to handle the highly technical elements of projects.
The heart of Furneaux Stewart’s operation is in London, where the main body of the design and communication team is based - some 35 people in all. A satellite office in Banbury houses the project, commercial and accounts end, whilst a recently-established US office, headed by client services director Julie Barnard, is taking the Furneaux Stewart house style to a new American audience.
It’s hard to name another company which has so many irons in the creative fire. That’s not to say that Furneaux Stewart is looking to take on the world - we all know that the road to corporate hell is paved with thinly-spread people - but that John Furneaux and the team see no reason to draw an artificial line halfway through the creative process. To the team of architects, designers and technical people have been added copywriters, graphic designers and new media experts, so that any associated marketing of an event or attraction can be handled in-house. In fact, the New Media division has added yet another strand - taking Furneaux Stewart into the realm of video and imaging technology.
And the company isn’t unwise enough to feel it has all the answers. Most of the projects it works on will come together conceptually in-house, and then it will look to people outside to work with them in translating the ideas into reality. The company has already worked with a number of high profile designers including Dave Bryant, Da
