The Story Behind Spheres

The bus ride that changed the table

Most designers look to other designers for inspiration. Nick Munro looks out of the window.

The story begins not at the Royal College of Art, but earlier. A teenager visiting London for the first time, staying with his Auntie Linda. She had a gift for the city, whisking her nephew around on the Routemaster bus, pointing out landmarks from the top deck in a running commentary that could have rivalled any tour guide. London has been Nick's second home ever since.

But it wasn't the landmarks that caught his eye.

It was the window winders.

Small, substantial metal castings on the side of the bus, turned on a spindle to raise or lower the top windows. Nick would turn them up and down just to feel the motion. What he couldn't get past was how well maintained they all were, how every single one would glide easily with a simple turn, smooth and precise and quietly satisfying in the hand.

He filed the feeling away. The way curious people do.

Years later, in a workshop in Sheffield, experimenting with new designs for a pepper mill, that feeling came back. The spherical form. The turning handle. The simple, precise mechanism that fits the hand and does its job without ceremony. The Spheres Salt and Pepper Mills were the answer.

Originally cast in Sheffield pewter, they have since been reissued in polished stainless steel and arrived in finishes from gold to bronze to copper. Nick has since visited cities all over the world, and the Spheres mills have followed him to pretty much all of them, and many more besides.

The form has barely changed. It hasn't needed to.

A little piece of London, by way of a workshop in Sheffield.