Fejer Family
A romantic encounter
I grew up in a house of colour and design. My father, George Fejer, was a designer in the post-war era who had come to the UK during World War II, fleeing the Nazis. He made a contribution to interior design which is recognised in the literature of that time, and in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Among other achievements, he worked on the Festival of Britain, and brought flat pack kitchens to the UK.
As well as being a designer he was a consultant on design, and educator, writer and an accomplished watercolourist. Despite being a creative thinker and a great communicator, my father never made much money . He continued to work until the day he died.
In 1960, George Fejer met Yvonne, a young journalist working on House and Garden magazine. My mother liked to tell the story of their first encounter. She was sent to interview him, and told her assistant, in the lift after the interview, that's the man I'm going to marry.
There was a 20 year age difference between the couple, and many of my father's friends disapproved of Yvonne, and thought that she was a flighty young thing who would break my father's heart. Nothing could have been further from the truth. My father owned a plot of land in Wimbledon village on which they built a modern bungalow from glass and wood.
In 1961, I came along, followed shortly by a sister, brother and menagerie of pets. It was an idyllic childhood. It was only years later that I realised how strange it was that we had no relatives on either side of the family.
Designer & Polymath
George Fejér was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1912
In 1931 he entered the prestigious Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich where he trained as architect. Having completed his architectural studies, he pursued a postgraduate course and submitted a thesis on translucent materials. In 1939 Fejer returned to Zurich. Continuing his research into translucent constructions he invented a new translucent material which he called 'Iso-lumen' and later that year visited England where he showed the material to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. He was allowed to stay in the UK. In 1940 Iso-lumen was manufactured by Pharoah-Gane & Co. Ltd. who employed him as a consultant. The material was used for repairing bomb damage. After the factory at which Iso-lumen was itself destroyed by bombing, production ceased and Fejer decided to pursue a career in industrial design. He began writing articles on plastics and design.
Between 1943-47 he worked for the Selection Engineering Company on the design of huts for the armed forces and prefabricated buildings (the Uni-Seco prefabs).
He designed furniture for the 'Britain Can Make It' at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 1946, and worked for Venesta, a manufacturer of plywood products, from 1946-49. For the Festival of Britain, in 1951, he designed the Plastics, Rubber and Commerce sections for the Power and Production pavilion.
From the 1950s onwards Fejer was a designer and design consultant for several companies including the kitchen manufacturers, Hygena Ltd. (1954-72); Crown Merton (1955-72); the white goods manufacturers AEI Hotpoint (1959-61); the bedroom and kitchen furniture manufacturers Boulton & Paul (1987-89); and for the manufacturers of bathroom fittings Ideal Standard (1989-92).
attributions
Yvonne – a life of flowers & art
Taken from the eulogy given by Geoff Carr at Yvonne's funeral in 2017
My memory of first meeting Yvonne is a little blurry. But what I do remember was the extraordinarily welcoming atmosphere of the place. I felt instantly at home. And the impresario of that welcome was Yvonne.
Yvonne Cooper-Keeble was a Suffolk girl, born in Ipswich. She was the daughter of Mary Daines, a glamorous actress. Glamour, is obviously a genetic trait, for Yvonne had it in spades. Sadly, her mother Mary’s life was cut short by illness. Yvonne, in an early manifestation of the concern for others that she showed throughout her life, nursed her mother until her death.
Yvonne went to art college. Art defined her life. She painted. She sculpted, as it were, in flowers – not least for the very church we are in today. She sculpted also with plants that were still growing, in the wonderful gardens of her houses . And she was mistress of one other art – cooking. If there had been a Turner prize for cookery, Yvonne would have been a contender.
After college, she went to London, got a job as a journalist, and lived with her sister Clare, her nephew Nick and her niece Caroline. There, and I quote Caroline, “She was so exciting. The fashionable way she dressed and the job she had with Conde Nast, with the regular articles by her on how to beautify your home, before every other paper started doing it.”
As a journalist myself I know that journalism is a great profession. A great way to meet new people. Which, one day in 1960, she did. She was sent by her editor at “House and Garden” to interview a certain George Fejer for a series called “Designers of the 20th Century”. During the interview she asked him how he would define good design. His reply was possibly the most elliptical proposal of marriage in history: “it would”, he said, “take the rest of our lives to explain that.” Yvonne felt likewise. As she told her secretary when they were going down in the lift from George’s office, “that’s the man I’m going to marry.”
Three of the consequences of that fateful interview were: Juli, Yolanda and their brother Alex. A fourth was the house where, a couple of decades later, I arrived with my bottle of wine. George, lucky fellow, owned a plot of land in Murray Road, Wimbledon. On it, after Juli was born and the flat they were living in was beginning to feel cramped, he erected a house of his own design. Juli told me that she can remember it being built. She would have been about two at the time. It was a thing of the future, a statement of 1960s optimism – all wood and glass and clean angles and flat roofs, with one, huge living room that had a galley kitchen installed at the far end. And what a kitchen. George was, after all, one of the foremost kitchen designers of the era.
The result, naturally, was perfect for parties. Juli and Yolanda told me of one in particular that Yvonne had organised when they were children. Instead of just serving the goodies on a plate, she made a train out of chocolate fingers, pulling wagons loaded with Smarties.
That was typical of her, as was another story Juli told me, of her fierce defence of her brood. One day, on the annual Fejer vacation to the Isle of Wight, Juli was trying to feed a donkey on the beach. Yvonne did not like the look of its large, yellow teeth bearing down on her daughter’s tiny hand, and put her own hand in the way as protection – getting badly bitten in the process.
There were parties for grown-ups, too, of course. One was the annual dinner that Yvonne cooked for George’s Hungarian friends, including Paul Nash, whose son Jeremy is also with us. A few months after I met Juli, I had the privilege of coming to one of these dinners. This was a group who had known each other since they were youngsters, and who were now happily forgetting the fact that they were perhaps slightly older than they once had been. Wine was consumed. Violins were played. Czardas were danced. But all the while, while the guests were on stage, it was the hostess behind the scenes who was guiding events.
In retrospect, that was the end of an era. Juli and Yo were spreading their wings. Alex was growing up. So Yvonne and George decided to move. The question was, where?
Well, you can take the girl out of Suffolk, but you cannot, apparently, take Suffolk out of the girl. And back she came – this time to Bury St Edmunds – and here she and George stayed.
Yvonne and George’s own house, centuries old, was in many ways the obverse of the ultra-modern one in Wimbledon. But in the ways that matter it was identical – a canvas on which Yvonne could paint her particular people-loving personality.
Alex Fejer 1965 –2024
If you want to see more about Alex's life, and photos of him, click through to the dedicated webpage here