Faced with the prospect of spending his entire working life looking after the financial dealings of other people, James Bradley turned a childhood passion for the varying textures of wood into a business that today, boasts the Australian Government as one of its satisfied clients.

The relaxed and very pleasant James Bradley has all the hallmarks of an English country gentleman; fair, tall, youthful and with a resonant voice that immediately demands attention. He should be a radio announcer, you think as he greets you personally at the door of his Launceston factory and ushers you into his office. But this casual approach belies the seriousness with which he approaches his craft.

"I see myself as a furniture manufacturer rather than a strict furniture designer", says James frankly. "I didn't start out to be, however. In fact, I started my working life in the London Stock Exchange, but was never really happy with being involved in the financial market. In a very real sense what I've ended up doing with my life, I suppose, stems back to my having been exposed to antiques and furniture as a child. My grandmother ran an antique business in England with a restoration workshop as part of its operations, and even as a small boy I became fascinated with the sort of creativity that was possible using woods as a medium.

"I can remember as an eight year old being able to look at a piece of furniture and identifying all the different woods used in creating it". Bradley pauses and grins reflectively, adding: "Of course the education system had a way of knocking out any intention I might have had of establishing a career in that field, and it wasn't until the late seventies that I finally decided to enrol at the London College of Furniture and look more closely at an area that had fascinated me since childhood".

The London of the late seventies and early eighties provided James Bradley with the kind of sensory input and stimulation he needed to fire his own creative drive. Straight out of College, and without any prior experience, he set up a cooperative workshop with a group of fellow graduates in the centre of the city and set about cultivating the patronage of those who could best afford to pay for the privilege of having office furniture made to measure; the very people for whom he had worked in the Stock Exchange.

It was a shrewd move, exposing the Bradley name and philosophy to architects and interior designers who shared his passion for harmonising the commercial workplace. By matching everything from the materials used in building the offices to the carpet laid in the foyer, and the wood selected for the boardroom table, Bradley was setting a trend he would later bring to Australia with outstanding success. Where once furniture had been seen simply as an adjunct to the more essential needs of a business, such as telephones and fax machines, Bradley was stressing the importance of achieving a total environment where the type and style of furniture chosen reflected something of the philosophy of both the client and the business.

"Two years of working within the Co-op was enough though", Bradley explains, "and I decided it was time to go out on my own. It was actually a coincidence that during this time of searching for other avenues, the brother of the Australian girl I had met in England - and who is now my wife - sent me a newspaper clipping about a lecturing job that was on offer at the Sydney College of Arts. At that stage I was looking to get away for a spell and Australia seemed attractive, not the least consideration of which was Antonia, and so in mid-1985 I made the move.

"In the initial period I don't think I had ever considered Tasmania as a place to set up home, but as it happened there was work. And we were right. When we looked at Tasmania, we based part of our decision to go ahead with the idea on the fact that we wanted a business that relied on low costs and high volume, and would survive the economic trip to Sydney and Melbourne.

"We have always worked to commissions. We have never made an item into stock for retail and then tried to sell it. Our strength is in dealing directly with architects and interior designers from all over Australia. We've cultivated an area that many other furniture manufacturers have steered clear of, working closely with the people paid to make the final decisions on a client's project. That's why the greater part of our work is in the commercial sector, and more often than not, myself and Tony Baulman - who works as a designer for me, find that we don't just have to come up with fresh ideas, but solve someone else's half-realised idea. When we get a brief we study it closely and then make any changes we feel are required, check those with the client and pass the entire project to a team who will then handle it from start to finish. This means that we know exactly what is happening with any project at any given time, and it allows me to stay on top of things".

And stay on top of things James does, particularly as many of the commissions the firm receives are often daunting logistically, as when they were asked to do work for Australia's new Parliament House in Canberra. Asked to manufacture the furniture for the House's offices, including that of the Prime Minister, James and his team had to study hundreds of pages of detailed specifications and drawings so that the final product was exactly what the architects and interior designers had envisaged. Given only six months in which to complete the task, James oversaw the operation with meticulous care, particularly as an inspector had been appointed to check on proceedings once a week. In the end, the firm was given a second commission of the same magnitude, but only one month in which to complete it. They did.

"I'm very lucky in that I've been able to recruit some very clever people", reflects James with sincere admiration. "I knew Tasmania was full of the sorts of people that I could explain things to and they would go ahead and do it, so it was very much a case of attracting those people who could be given a complicated problem and think it through before solving it as if they were an extension of my hands.

"Of course there can always be challenges with the clients themselves, particularly when it comes to money and the costings given for a job. What I've discovered however, is that it's always best to establish exactly how much the client wants to spend before we begin. That then gives me an idea of the sorts of woods and materials I can look at, because there's no point going for some magnificent line of wood if the client isn't prepared to spend in that range. Other times I might let the client select the range of timbers they would like me to look at. And then there are those projects where money is not a criteria, and they're wonderful to work on because then you really can blend all the different elements of architecture, design and environment together absolutely precisely".

As an example, James cites the work his firm did at the heardquarters of the Commonwealth Bank in Sydney where in order to match the new businessman for whom I had arranged work, who thought I had some skills that might be worth exploring. It was his idea that we look at Tasmania as a possible place for setting up a furniture design and manufacturing business".

Excited by the results of a feasibility study on the Apple Isle, Bradley was further impressed by the ready availability of some f the world's best timbers, the inexpensive industrial premises and the history of furniture-making for which Tasmania had become renowned throughout Australia. Purchasing an old tyre factory in Launceston and buying machinery from liquidation sales in Sydney, James Bradley, Furniture Designer began operations with just a dedicated team of three people and an ambition to conquer the top-end of the furniture market.

"We chose to put ourselves unashamedly at the top end for many reasons, paramount amongst which was the desire to avoid price wars in the budget furniture game", James continues. "We realised that if we could specialise and we could produce furniture which was not cheaper, but better than anything our competitors could produce we could have a constant stream of work with the existing original woodwork, Queensland Maple was brought in. The fact that Tasmanian timber was inappropriate for that specific task did not deter Bradley from taking on the project. As in his graduate years, it is the project and the harmonising of the work with its environs that matters, the source of the material is a secondary consideration - although 90% of the timber Bradley uses comes from Tasmania.
Despite the fact that many of his clients are large corporations and companies, Bradley himself seems unaffected by the rising profile his firms' work is attracting both locally and internationally. Having only recently contracted an agent and showroom in Sydney by the name of Anibou, James Bradley remains eager to direct his work largely toward the commercial sector since in his opinion, Australia still lacks a true appreciation of furniture other than from a purely functional point of view.

"It may be that here in Australia we don't yet have a heritage of furniture in the same way that you might find it in Europe where there is often an abundance of old furniture in nearly every house", he explains. "The climate in Australia has played a large part in this because it invites people to stay outdoors rather than indoors where the furniture is. There has not therefore, been the same emphasis on furniture beyond what was absolutely essential to eat or sleep on. People in Australia don't sit in their homes and look at their furniture as they might perhaps do in colder climates of the world.

"That being the case then, it makes sense that the main area for the appreciation of furniture is the workplace, and I would hold that Australia has some of the highest standards of commercial furniture in the world. What we have to perhaps focus on now is developing furniture that is uniquely Australian, as many of our artists have managed to do. Works by people such as Ken Done for instance, are immediately recognised as distinctly Australian: it simply couldn't have come from anywhere else. So why not with furniture? The strength of our furniture will come from its having an Australian identity".

James is silent for a moment - as though he were deep in thought, before he adds: "We have a very esoteric architecture here in Australia. Perhaps when architects are designing their buildings they will take the surrounds into consideration, and people like me will then be able to draw from this when we come to design and manufacture the furniture that will go into them".

As evidence of James Bradley's growing reputation, he was awarded the Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Tasmania for 1989, an award which not only affirmed his success as a business and craftsman, but perhaps more importantly in the long term, allowed him to travel to the West Coast of the United States in search of potential export markets. Whilst James sees the international market as the next logical step for his ambitions, he is hesitant to "jump on the export bandwagon", believing that he still has a way to go in consolidating his Australian operations.

"I'd like to be recognised within both the design and the architectural fields as the most respected furniture manufacturer in Australia", he says candidly and without hesitation. "We're on the right track, it's a question now of getting the architects and the designers to think of us as synonymous with any job they have to do. For me personally, satisfaction comes from accepting a commission from someone whom I respect and then solving the problem of how to make it. Success for me is measured by the number of times I do that well. I don't mind where my work ends up, an office in Australia or perhaps one day Japan, the Hobart Stock Exchange or Parliament House, so long as that work has met the criteria of the person who asked me to do it".