There’s nothing a designer likes more than a problem that’s difficult to solve,” Paul O’Leary says, smiling to himself. “You see something that doesn’t work and you just can’t understand how anybody could have let that go.

“It’s a disease, we can’t help it…”

While most accomplished designers will more than recognise the symptoms of this ‘disease’, there are very few who can claim that the manifestation of them has become the shorthand definition of a distinct style – the deVOL look.

In person, co-founder O’Leary is as stylishly dishevelled as the kitchens his company is famous for. He is, although he would modestly contest it, the embodiment of the brand’s ethos and despite the success still seems baffled that he has been able to turn this obsession into not just a career but a hugely lucrative lifestyle business.

Loughborough University design graduates Philip deVries and Paul O’Leary squashed their names together to form deVOL in 1989, renovating antique furniture in their rented workshop. After 10 years, deVries left to set up a property business and O’Leary opened a shop in the Leicestershire village of Quorn, selling deVOL kitchen furniture.

In 2012, he moved to Cotes Mill, a 16th-century water mill set in twelve acres of natural meadows and gardens on the banks of the River Soar, just outside Loughborough. The rambling five-storey building has since become synonymous with the deVOL brand – the Repair Shop or River Cottage of kitchens.

In 2011, O’Leary’s partner Helen Parker became creative director and Robin McLellan was appointed as managing director, marking an expansion that also saw the first London showroom in 2014 and New York in 2019.

The move into America was closely followed by their own Emmy-nominated TV show – For The Love Of Kitchens and, back home, in April this year deVOL was given the King’s Award for Enterprise.

While that CV seems like a rightly laudable rise-and-rise story, in conversation O’Leary is self-aware enough to constantly refer to a tougher journey than the summary implies.

There was, he says, as much luck as judgement. “We were broke for 15 years and struggled to pay the rent so I want people to know that success is always possible. My advice for anybody who’s been running a business for years and feels like they’re barely making ends meet is just don’t give up.”

To the outside world, deVOL is such a distinct company, but do you personally have a defined philosophy? Or is it all in your head?

A bit of both probably. There’s certainly a traditional look to our furniture and even though there are various different ranges and styles, they all seem to have that in common. But it’s not just furniture, it’s the lifestyle. Rooms with character, full of things you’ve gathered to keep you company in your kitchen while you’re preparing food. Things that you love, things that put you in a good mood. The type of customers that are drawn to us are the ones that fully embrace the eclectic mix of antique and functional furniture.

Helen is our creative director but her kitchen has only got one deVOL cupboard in it, the rest is an old kitchen table, an old glazed cupboard to keep crockery in, and an old work table to chop vegetables on – that is the deVOL look. 

Let’s go back in time a bit. When did you first think of design as something that people did and that you could do?

That’s a really nice question because when we did the TV show, I was surprised that a lot of young people were drawn to it. Watching the programme sowed seeds for them and I don’t know if anybody sowed that seed for me. I think my first experience of any type of design was helping my mum in the garden.

I loved changing something dramatically like digging a pond and adding some crazy paving and a rockery. My parents were always broke so we had a load of post-war dark brown plywood furniture and they decided to get the kids to paint it gloss white. I quickly realised that painting was actually quite difficult so maybe that was a little seed too, I didn’t want to be that bad at something again. 

When did the formal training start?

I loved art at school. It was one of the subjects I could do so I went to art college at 17. The problem was that everybody was so much more talented than I was. They were all artists. They could draw, they could paint, they could sculpt and they were passionate and had ideas they wanted to express.

I didn’t have any ideas and I quickly found out that I’m not an artist. It wasn’t until a couple of years later when I got into university to do industrial design that I was suddenly in my element. I’d been a lazy teenager but here I was focused.

That’s industrial design, where did the love of old furniture come from?

Well, I didn’t love old furniture and traditional styling when I came out of university. When you do a course like that you imagine you’re going to be designing a kettle or a toaster that will end up in John Lewis.

That was the aspiration, but actually when I finished I set up a design consultancy and offered our services to anybody who wanted them – which was pretty much nobody and we struggled to make ends meet. I found the clients quite scary too, I remember one came round because he wasn’t happy with the work and we all hid underneath the tables… 

I’m sure they were very stylish tables though…

You know what? They weren’t! My own taste didn’t really develop until I switched from a design consultancy to restoring antique furniture. When you do that you become aware of what a hand-cut dovetail from an 1850 chest of drawers looks like and how 1940s furniture is so different as they’re machined dovetails. They don’t have the character. The timber’s different. It’s got plywood in it. The grain isn’t as close together. It’s really soft, you can put your fingernail into the timber. Same for the styles – does it look squat? Does it look elegant? Has it got round, ugly bulbous feet or stylish feet?

You start to notice every detail and you can’t help but fall in love with the people who made it. You’re in awe of their skill because every single saw cut is there for you to see. So when you find yourself designing your own, without realising it you start drawing things that have the proportion, detail and characteristics of all of that traditional furniture. So that’s where it came from. It didn’t come from university, it didn’t come from my childhood. It came from restoring antique furniture. It was a simple stroke of luck.

Surely design moves on though, isn’t it about interpreting traditional tastes for the modern customer?

For me, it’s about what’s right and what’s wrong. So for example, if you were to design a drawer that was two metres wide, that’s wrong. That’s a very ungainly drawer and would be very difficult to keep running smoothly. Then, of course, if it’s a narrow drawer it only needs one knob in the middle. If it’s a wider drawer, then two knobs would be right. But how wide does it need to be before you need two knobs? And how far apart should those knobs be?

You find that out by looking at old furniture because it was made like that for hundreds of years and it’s familiar in your head. I think our designs are right and if we thought it would look better if it was a couple of inches wider, we would’ve made it a couple of inches wider.

I really enjoyed your TV show as the laid-back aesthetic of it showed the personality of deVOL so well. How much control did you have?

The truth is that we were very nervous to do the TV show because clearly this is our business and if the show was naff it would be bad for us. There’s a lot of bad makeover shows where everything’s botched, slapped on, and stuck with double-sided tape that will last for five minutes. That’s obviously the very opposite of what deVOL is. So we wanted it to be really genuine.

We wanted to show the antique shopping, all the designing and how it actually happens. We didn’t want a quick before shot, an after shot and some happy customers going, ‘wow, I love it’. TV’s really hard though, it takes it out of you. We’re proud of it and it’s definitely been good for us, but it’s so draining. I don’t know how Kevin McCloud does it year after year. 

I think deVOL comes across as a very genuine labour of love and that’s really authentic. 

No, you can’t fake it. I was really pleased because when we started doing the show I was worried  people would think we’re a bit above our station with showrooms in London and New York. A carpenter who’s got a workshop in his garage making bits of furniture and doing the odd garden gate and fitted wardrobe would hate us and think ‘it’s all right for them, they’ve got these fancy showrooms’.

So I was really intent on talking about when we were broke for 15 years and couldn’t pay the rent. I want people to know that success is always possible. My advice for anybody who’s been running their business for years and feels like they’re barely making ends meet is just don’t give up. Just because you haven’t been successful in the first 15 years doesn’t mean you can’t be successful in the next.

Listen to the full interview below…