History of Beaver and Tapley Furniture

In the early thirties Beaver and Tapley started manufacturing teak tea trolleys and subsequently became furniture manufacturers. The company made and sold an increasing range of occasional and some bedroom furniture, with a break during the Second World War, selling the product ranges wholly on price. In 1956 Tapley decided that just being cheaper than their competitors was not the way forward in the long term and decided on a number of new strategies – to use top designers, to advertise nationally and generally to sell on quality and design and not purely on price. The first venture was the Penguin Bookshelf, designed in collaboration with Penguin Books. This was sold under an adaptation of their trademark and advertised within inserts in Penguin books. In the early eighties Burgundy Oak was introduced as an alternative to teak and the sale of separate tops and base units came out which gave the floor models as much flexibility as their wall hung counterparts. In the early nineties Light Oak became the third finish option with Cherry being introduced as a fourth finish in the late nineties. Tapley’s modular furniture range had given consumers the opportunity to move away from traditional individual pieces of furniture. Consumers were now able to design their own room sets and layouts with as many or as few pieces as they wished.