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Joyce (1918-2001) and Selwyn (1918-1994) Coffey

Owen and Selwyn Coffee, two brothers of the Melbourne-based Coffey family, are the founders of Kempthorne Lighting, a company that began in 1931 as Kempthorne Lighting Works. While Kempthorne’s catalogue of lighting is considerable, information about the company’s design methodology remains illusive. Conclusions must be inferred from meagre resources.

The men came from a family of four brothers (including Earle, later to become Kempthorne’s managing director and Terence, active in the company’s administration). Their father was a returned soldier from the 1914-18 War and a clerk for the Melbourne Tramways Department. Selwyn (b.1913) is often described as Kempthorne’s designer. Selwyn studied art and industrial design at the Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT) but his biographical details suggest that he did not complete the course.

His wife, Joyce Coffey, is also described as Kempthorne’s designer in a number of press references that begin with an article in Melbourne’s The Argus in 1949. The illustrated feature describes Mrs Coffey as the mother of two children, Carolyn and Jerry, an “efficient housewife” and the “chief designer” for Kempthorne. “You can always find time [to be a designer] if you are keen enough,” Joyce told The Argus.

Joyce Coffey trained in drawing at the Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT) before the 1939-45 War, completed the course and worked as a mechanical and engineering draughting teacher as well as a commercial artist. Engineering draughting is a common training route for early industrial designers. Described as a “first class mechanical engineering [draughtswoman]”, her husband asserts to The Argus reporter in 1949, “It is Joyce’s job to do all the designing and our firm does the rest.”

The Argus describes the newly designed Coffey home as “fitted out like a factory” with “all the latest labour-saving devices.” In the journalist’s portrayal of the Coffey’s as efficiency experts, she is subconsciously summarising the plot of the recently released popular memoir of the family of the “efficiency experts, industrial engineers and designers Lillian Moller Gilbreth and Frank Gilbreth, Cheaper by the Dozen (1948). Joyce’s husband, Selwyn, insists that “[Joyce’s] time is far too valuable [to Kempthorne] to be spent doing household chores,”

By the mid-1950s, the Kempthorne range of lighting features in the 1956 Olympic Games Arts Festival held in Melbourne and Joyce and Selwyn Coffey are listed as amongst Australia’s notable industrial designers in the Arts Festival Guide to the Exhibition accompanying the exhibition displays. The company also receives an award for their “well light” and one of their wall bracket “Tempo” down-lighters is illustrated in the Arts Festival Guide. It is seems evident that they formed a design partnership within Kempthorne.

In 1959, Joyce and Selwyn continued to work as a design team in the development of Kempthorne’s exterior wall light range. In 1963, The Women’s Weekly features a full-page advertisement illustrating Selwyn and Joyce at the drawing board with the photograph caption describing them as the heads of the Kempthorne design team. By the 1960s, the corporate identity of Kempthorne had been radically altered (perhaps by Joyce, who had worked in illustration in the 1940s) and their logo, typography and catalogue illustrations feature the stylish modernist collage-style illustration of the era.

Like the noted Australian designers Geoff and Dahl Collings or the design partnership of Grant and Mary Featherston, the supporting evidence for the work of Joyce and Selwyn Coffey design team strongly suggests that their roles were intertwined. The Kempthorne design legacy should be recast to emphasis Selwyn and Joyce’s partnership as design team leaders. While Selwyn held a number of lighting fixture patents, their joint design authorship is consistently supported in their media appearances.

28 April 2011

[A more recent biographical study is available at Harriet Edquist (1 January 2012), 'Coffey/Kempthorne Lighting’.RMIT Design Archive Journal, 2:1, 2012,p.4-11

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Writers:

Michael Bogle

Date written:

2020

Last updated:

2020