Stephen Paul Bayley Hon FRIBA is a British author, critic, columnist, consultant, broadcaster, debater and curator. In the 1970s, he was a lecturer in the history of art at the University of Kent, but first became prominent as an authority on style and design when, in 1979, he began a collaboration with Habitat founder Sir Terence Conran to promote a more intelligent awareness of design. This led to the creation of The Boilerhouse Project, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the V&A, which became London's most successful gallery of the 1980s. The Boilerhouse evolved into a unique Design Museum which was opened by Margaret Thatcher in 1989. Bayley was the founding director of The Boilerhouse Project - Britain's first permanent exhibition of design, host to more than 20 exhibitions in five years including Ford Motor Company, Sony, Issey Miyake, Coca-Cola, and Taste. He then became chief executive of the Design Museum in London, which grew out of the Boilerhouse Project. In 2007, Bayley became The Observers architecture and design correspondent. He writes for a huge range of national and international consumer, trade and professional publications including: The Spectator, The Times, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Sud Deutsches Zeitung, GQ, Car, Financial Times, Vanity Fair, and Octane. He has been a contributing editor of GQ since the magazine was launched. He has been a columnist in The Times and The Independent, as well as the Art Critic of The Listener and the Architecture Critic of The Observer. He is currently Design Critic of The Spectator. He has also appeared on television series such as Have I Got News for You and Grumpy Old Men. His 1980 BBC2 documentary Little Boxes was the first treatment of design on television. It was produced by Patrick Uden and included unique interviews with Dieter Rams, Ettore Sottsass, Raymond Loewy, and Tom Wolfe. Since the 1980s, he has been referred to as the "design guru" - a title he accepts with what he's explained as self-deprecating irony.
Bayley has sometimes stirred up controversy by strong-worded arguments. In an article in The Times in 2018, he wrote that "without 'colonial' interventions there would be no Elgin marbles to discuss. The Acropolis would be dust." In his Observer column of 22 March 2009, he claimed polemically that: "Botticelli's model for The Birth of Venus was a common Florentinehooker called Simonetta Vespucci, painted nude to titillate his client". He was arguing against the motion that: "Britain has become indifferent to beauty" proposed by Roger Scruton and David Starkey, who held an image of The Birth of Venus next to an image of the British supermodel Kate Moss, in order to demonstrate how "cruddy" British culture is.
Personal life
He lives in his South West London house with his wife, Flo, and their two children, Bruno and Coco. By 2008, he had lived there for 25 years and says that the house still isn't finished: "doing up a home is like food and sex: it should never be rushed" and that the sole purpose of the garden is as "a place to sit with a book and a glass of wine".
Selected publications
In Good Shape: Style in Industrial Products 1900 to 1960. Design Council, London, 1979.
