OBITUARY: GABY SCHREIBER

A Classical Stylist with a Flair for Plastics

Best known for the interior re-design of prestigious BOAC aircraft of the 1950s - the Comet IV, VC10, DC7C and Britannia - and later for her work on the QE2, Gaby Schreiber, who died in July 1991, was a consultant designer and successful business woman in a field dominated by men. However, specialising in corporate interior design 'from teacups to buildings' as she put it, another area crept into her brief, notably plastics, in which she played a significant role.

Born in Vienna in the early 1920s, she studied art and stage design and arrived in England before the war. She formed her own company Gaby Schreiber Associates in 1943 and her design flair was put to use designing plastics eating utensils for the forces, and after the war kitchen and household equipment for Runcolite Ltd. Her classic stacking cups of 1946 and divided dishes of 1947 could be designs of today. Her elegant colander of 1948 was equal to the best contemporary Italian design.

After a trip to the USA in 1948 she described how the large department stores mounted special displays of well designed mass-produced articles; but she also remarked that although goods such as vacuum cleaners and TV sets were manufactured to high standards, common articles in everyday use did not match up to the same robust quality.

R D Russell spoke of the 'great elegance' of her kitchenware designs. An elegant lady, herself, Schreiber saw mass production as a way of making luxury goods available to the genera] public, and plastics, the 'magical substance that consents to he prosaic', provided the medium, Her fruit juicers, tableware, utensils and trays are still immensely practical and of a purity of design that has hardly dated. Russell wrote in Art Industry  (Oct 1948) that he hoped that the younger buying public would he stimulated by new wartime influences and would demand a higher standard of design on than the retailer or trade buyer had ever wished on it. Schreiber promoted that ideal, and designed the goods that helped shape today's market.

Sylvia Katz