Douglas Burrage Snelling (1916–1985) was an Australian architect and furniture designer.
Early life
He was born on 24 February 1916, the only child of a bootmaker, Albert Edward Snelling, and his wife Ethel May, née Burrage, in Gravesend, Kent, England. He arrived in Wellington, New Zealand, with his parents in 1926.
As a teenager, he began his own graphic arts and shop window design business in Wanganui. In 1937, he travelled to Hollywood, where he freelanced making sketches, and began to emulate Errol Flynn's style.
He returned to New Zealand, in 1938, and became a writer, broadcaster and publicist of new movies and stars, until 1940.
He moved to Sydney in 1940 and worked as a publicist and in a munitions factory during the beginning of World War II.
Product designer (1945-1948) In 1945, he married New Zealand heiress Nancy Bear née Springhall. With her money, he opened a business designing shop windows and furniture. His chairs featured parachute webbing and functional modernist designs, and according to the Powerhouse Museum, were "Australia's first popular, mass produced range of furniture sold widely through the major department stores from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s." The now iconic chairs, branded with other designs as the "Snelling Line", went on sale, in 1946, from the department store Anthony Hordens. Snelling became a partner in a company, Functional Products Pty. Ltd, that made furniture in a factory at St Peters, from 1947 to 1955. For Australia at the time, the chair designs were revolutionary. In reality, they were near copies, made from Australian hardwood, that were adapted from the '600 series' wartime-production designs that Danish-American designer, Jens Risom (1916–2016) had made for his business partner, Hans Knoll, in 1941. Snelling also did work for a consumer electronics manufacturer, Kriesler, including on the design of the bakelite case of their iconic 'Sealed Midget' (model 11-4) radio, also known as the 'Beehive'.
Both the furniture range and radio were radical departures from staid and conventional pre-war designs; both sold in large numbers in Australia, during the consumption boom after the end of wartime austerity measures. Examples of his furniture are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. There remains a thriving market for his webbing chairs.
Architect (1948 - 1975) Snelling and his wife travelled to America where he was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's work. He would also be influenced by California-based American architects who were associated with Wright's design tradition, notably, Gordon Drake, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Richard Neutra.
When they returned to Australia in 1948, Snelling met architect, Harry Seidler, and began designing houses. However, his very first competed building was the factory building in which his furniture was made, at St Peters. Otherwise, he seems to have begun his practice, Douglass B. Snelling & Associates, in 1948, drawing upon his previous experience and redesigning shop interiors and displays, including the Children's Department of the Sydney Snow department store and two other city shops. He became a registered architect in 1952. He built modernist houses, apartment buildings, and office buildings.
Snelling emerged as an architect for the wealthy and socially-prominent in Sydney. One of his designs, the Kelly house at Bellevue Hill, won the House of the Year Award, from the Melbourne-based Architecture and Arts magazine, for houses constructed during 1955. His notable 1950s designs were for extremely large houses—the Kelly house had 60 squares or 557 square metres of floor area—that included staff quarters, built in fashionable Sydney suburbs. This was in marked contrast to the functional, European-influenced small house designs being produced around the same time, by Harry Seidler.He and his wife divorced in 1959, and the next year he married Patricia Anne Youdale, née Gale (a Sydney socialite and daughter of a wealthy Sydney property developer and grazier), with whom he raised three sons and her daughter by a previous marriage.