4 heaped teaspoons

Suffering from bouts of insomnia hardly sounds like an excuse for a design-blog posting. Yet those dry and brittle hours when you lie awake may as well spent with beautifully designed objects, as not.

The plastic ‘Sweet Dreams’ beaker designed by A H Woodfull for Cadbury Bournvita in 1949 at least soothes a tired, sleep-deprived eye. With a beatific smile on the body of the mug and its blue ‘sleeping cap’ hat with a red bobble, it is all that is right about mid-century design. The cap even turns over and becomes a saucer. Ahhh..

This mug is one of those pieces of design that gets collectors over-excited and sweatily breathless. They will inexhaustibly hunt it down. And it is particularly baggable with it’s blue plastic hat / saucer. Although issued in an earlier ceramic version, the one that entices is plastic - so tactile and right for the period.

Woodfull was working with British Industrial Plastics Ltd at the time he designed this promotional give-away for Cadbury's and the materials it's manufactured from have those age-of-wonder-style names: Beetle urea formaldehyde, polythene and cellulose acetate.

You can almost hear the bubbling test tubes in the laboratory when they dreamt this one up.

Toys for modern young minds

Paul and Marjorie Abbatt designed toys. Not just any toys, but meticulously thought-out, designed and edited toys. They sold their toys in a spic and span modernist shop on Wimpole Street in London’s West End. The shop opened in 1936 and was designed by the Abbatt’s good friend, architect Erno Goldfinger.

Goldfinger designed the façade as a wall of glass, broken only by the name ‘Paul & Marjorie Abbatt Ltd’ in cut out Gill lettering. The interior, intended to be child-friendly, with low-level displays and children’s chairs, was nevertheless rather severe. Goldfinger was severely modernist here in a way he would never repeat.

Interested in the educational value of play, the Abbatt’s produced catalogues with extensive information on age-appropriate toys. Images of Ladybird children earnestly enjoying themselves with Abbatt toys – from snap cards to climbing frames – were wrapped in covers displaying the Abbatt logo of two children, again designed by Goldfinger.

Yet one can only guess how comfortable the real fit between modernism and childhood was.

What to wear in the garden?

On a hot summer day like today - when you remember the old adage that tea is actually rather refreshing, if not rather cooling - you may take a sip from a cup like this. I wonder if it is because I don’t have a garden that I am constantly drawn to idyllic images of gardens and people gardening, rusty old gardening tools, terracotta plant pots and old greenhouses. I have no real desire to garden, you understand, just to partake of the garden as subject in art.

The Beswick pottery pattern Green Fingers, seen here, is one of those beautiful mismatches of pattern, form and function so common on mid-century pottery. Beswick produced equally eccentric tea sets with ballerinas on them and even a set with cacti prickling across it.

On the larger set of Green Fingers china the illustrations suffer from being slapped rather haphazardly onto the china. Other pieces show gentlemen resting against trees, whilst the ladies dig away in their proto-New Look skirts and ballerina pumps. There is no attempt to match the form to its decoration or to balance the quantity of plain colour with the illustrations.

But for me, the isolated image on this cup is just right. It could have appeared on a 1950s Vogue page concerning what to wear in the garden. You can practically hear the clink of glasses, the buzzing of bees and the creak of wicker.