# Oliver Hemming



## Always"watching" (Sep 21, 2013)

Oliver Hemming is a British designer of some distinction, with his works being found in a number of museums in the UK and elsewhere, including The Museum of Design in Plastics (MoDiP) which is attached to the Arts University Bournemouth. He is probably best known for his clocks, but Hemming has designed other household items, all of which have an original and pleasing character.

Oliver Hemming was born in Kenya in 1959 but spent his childhood in the English countryside. He lived in London as a teenager, going to St. Paul's School before attending art school in Oxford and then at Leicester Art School, where he studied 3D design, specialising in silversmithing. During this latter period, his talent was recognised and he won the Johnson mathey Silver Award in 1982 and was awarded a bursary from the Royal Society of Arts.

On graduating from college, Hemming opened his own silversmithing studio and worked mainly on private commissions. In 1985, however, he started a company called Ziro, making contemporary clocks (and watches?), with designs of his own that were to become very influential in the development of modern clock design. By 1995, Ziro employed about 50 people in the USA and UK, making around 350,000 pieces a year with exports to over 35 countries.

The company was sold in 1998 and Oliver took a two-year sabbatical, now living in Hong Kong. He then started a new business and put together a focused yet diverse range of clocks made to his designs. He now works with suppliers from all over the world and his designs for clocks and other products, including the nio range, are widely considered to be distinctive, innovative and uniquely differentiated. He won the Red Dot Award for product design in 2008 for a tall acrylic and ceramic kitchen/table grinding mill which has a cup at the top for showing the condiments to be ground. Another important non-clock Oliver Hemming design is his io (now known as nio due to a copyright problem) stainless steel teaset of 2002.and a tall pepper/salt/spice mill in acrylic with a ceramic grinding mechanism.

So now to the clocks, which are somehow a fusion of the traditional with the very modern, and in style range from "full-on" dials to the very minimalistic. The most important of Hemming's clock designs are probably the Desire quartz alarm clocks (no mechanical movements in Hemming clocks, I'm afraid) which are substantial in weight and hand feel, and yet are very small in diameter. In fact, the smaller versions are 6cm in diameter, use mineral glass for extra scratch resistance, and weigh in at 250 grams for the metal-cased varieties. So here are a few of the Desire alarm clocks for you to look at (photo below from milled.com):










(photo from watchco.com)










These Desire clocks come in a variety of different cases and faces, with rose gold and black as case colours as well as silver, and faces which range from the full-on variety, as immediately above, to the very minimal. Desire alarm clocks vary in price from about Â£40 to Â£65.

Oliver Hemming also produces circular wall clocks, again with a variety of faces majoring on the colours red, black and white, and there are also mantel clocks cased in hand-made oak which are a modern interpretation of the Shaker style. These ranges are very attractive but my favourite Oliver Hemming clocks are in the nio table clock range and the Swing-Pendulum wall clocks range. Above all, I adore the Â£155 nio minimalistic table clock, originally designed by Hemming in 1982, and available with a white face as well as the black one shown here, and fittingly, this photo comes from oliverhemming.com:


----------

