Few book publishers have a piece of furniture named after them but Penguin Books – which celebrates its 90th anniversary in 2025 – is the noble exception. When design pioneer Jack Pritchard met publisher Allen Lane, who set up Penguin in 1935, their meeting inspired the remarkable Isokon Penguin Donkey, a classic of British modernist furniture, designed by émigré designer Egon Riss.
The anthropomorphic Donkey has four legs and two plywood 'panniers' for books – Penguins, of course – and in its enlightened marriage of knowledge and engineering it remains central to the catalogue of Isokon, the design company that Pritchard founded in 1931 with Wells Coates. Along with other Isokon classics, such as the Long Chair, the Short Chair and Nesting Tables – and Ernest Race’s equally loved Penguin Donkey 2 – Penguin Donkey 1 is to be sold by Harry CJ Wix.
© Pritchard Papers / UEA
Isokon is justly renowned for its century-old roll-call of design talent from Bauhaus alumni Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, as well as, more recently, Wells Coates, Riss and Ernest Race, through to Jasper Morrison, Foster + Partners, Barber Osgerby and Shin & Tomoko Azumi. The Isokon Building in north London, also known as the Lawn Road Flats, is its lasting legacy: a dazzling white cliff-face of Grade-I listed modernity.
It’s now revered, with its own on-site museum and flats beloved of design cognoscenti, conjuring the 1930s when its in-house restaurant The Isobar, now sadly defunct, was London’s avant-garde lodestar.
But Isokon has also had a deep and intriguing Suffolk connection as well. In 1962, Pritchard and his psychiatrist wife Molly bought a 50-acre plot in Blythburgh, near Southwold and, a year later, to the design of architect Jennifer Jones – Jack’s daughter with Beatrix Tudor-Hart – and her architect husband Colin Jones, they built an innovative single-storey house, also called Isokon. Open-plan, with glass windows, a sauna and solar-powered swimming pool, it was ahead of its time, just like its London namesake . If you want to experience it for yourself, to this day guests can stay in an annex called the Isokabin.
Magnus Englund, who co-wrote ‘Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain’ with Leyla Daybelge – both trustees of the Isokon Gallery Trust – is sifting through material from the Isokon house, now inhabited by one of Jack and Molly’s grandchildren.
"Much is in the University of East Anglia [UEA holds the Pritchard Papers archive], but there's still a lot of ephemera left," says Magnus, with the Trust holding the Pritchard’s birth certificates, passports, school records, photographs and Blythburgh guestbooks – themselves a rollcall of the 20th century’s design intelligentsia. Molly, a keen birdwatcher, has left an illustrated ornithological diary of considerable charm.
Blythburgh’s Isokon was a hub and rural counterpoint to the Isokon building in London and in its heyday had a superb art collection, with work by Ben Nicholson, Josef Albers and Henry Moore, with whom Jack was friendly. “He wrote that in the Blitz he used to sleep alongside Henry on a haystack at Perry Green after getting drunk on bottles of wine,” says Magnus.
The Pritchard’s weren’t in Suffolk by accident. The Pritchard family had a property close to the pier in Southwold in the Victorian era called Craven Cottage: you can see the family tree carved with initials into the bricks. It was sold off, but the Southwold connection remains in the form of the Pritchard family’s graves.
Jack left another East Anglian legacy in his love of boating. Like his old friend and collaborator Wells Coates, Jack was a keen sailor and in the post-war era he helped set up a boat-building firm which still exists as Martham Boats, as well as a sailing club for young people called Theta, which demonstrated Jack’s somewhat gung-ho approach to child-rearing, emphasising the building of initiative and character with an ideological twist.
“In the Isokon building in London, Jack and Molly’s children Jonathan and Jeremy lived in their own flat,” says Magnus. “At a young age they’d be encouraged to go alone to Piccadilly Circus together.”
Over the years the Pritchard’s lived well and travelled across the world.
An engineer by education, he had a keen interest in materials, including a stake in Venesta (‘Veneer Estonia’), the Baltic company which was the world’s largest plywood manufacturer in the interwar years. Molly died in 1985 and Jack followed in 1992, and both would surely have been delighted to have seen the phenomenal trajectory of their company.
Now Isokon’s furniture is rightly feted, in world design collections and with a vibrant antiques market. The first Penguin Donkey was originally made in 1939 and because of the outbreak of war, only 100 were produced. Magnus knows of just three in existence, including one at the Isokon Museum donated by a woman who got in touch out of the blue. “When she sent me a photo I realised straight away it was an original. She said, 'would you like it for your museum?'” The answer was a rapid 'yes', and it’s now on long-term loan to the Isokon Gallery alongside an original Short Chair given by a benefactor who decided they couldn’t possibly sit in it due to its rarity.
Such is the interest in Isokon that in 2022 designer Margaret Howell, who resides in Shingle Street in Suffolk, held an exhibition of Isokon designs and reissued the Marcel Breuer Nesting Tables (1936).
It seems odd to find that Isokon was not always so appreciated. Although first listed in 1974, the Lawn Road Flats were squatted, poorly bodged by Camden Council and mooted for demolition from the then GLC leader Ken Livingstone. Now they attract connoisseurs, as does the Isokabin, and the story of Isokon builds year by year. In our collection, Harry CJ Wix hopes to build on Isokon's base of design connoisseurs and to celebrate Suffolk’s living link to the Bauhaus.
© Tom de Gay / Isokon Gallery Trust