Giles Grendey 1693-1780

Giles Grendey (b. 1693) was one of the most prolific cabinet-makers of George II’s reign, due partly to the fact that he occasionally labelled his furniture, unlike most English cabinet-makers of the period.  

After serving a seven-year apprenticeship, he became freeman in 1716 at the age of 23. By 1726, he had his own workshops at Aylesbury House in Clerkenwell, London, where he employed a fleet of cabinet-makers producing mainly walnut and mahogany furniture.  Some of the firm’s chairs are stamped with initials inside the seat rails and legs, which usually indicate the individual cabinet-makers responsible for making the piece of furniture. The workshop, therefore, must have been of considerable size making it necessary to mark the pieces, presumably for payment to the individual maker.

Giles Grendey also traded in timber and japanned furniture. The latter made famous by the discovery of R. W. Symonds of a vast commission to the Dukes of Infantado for the Castle of Lazcano in Spain, where some seventy-two pieces of red japanned furniture were recorded in the 1930s, prior to their dispersal around the world.

Furniture by Grendey features in many prominent houses, including Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire as well as Stourhead and Longford Castle in Wiltshire.  Further afield his pieces have been traced back to Spain, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark and Sweden; catering to this international market by adapting his designs, to suit the prevailing fashions in different countries.