Hitch Mylius is one of the UK’s manufacturing success stories. The firm creates seating with simple, clean lines to Tristram Mylius’s own designs and in collaboration with some of today’s most talented and celebrated architects and designers, including David Chipperfield, Nigel Coates and more recently, Shin and Tomoko Azumi.

The orders are flowing in for high profile projects, such as Richard Rogers’ Ford Design Centre in London, the offices for London’s mayor and The Four Seasons Canary Riverside Hotel created by Philippe Starck and United Designers.

Hitch Mylius has also been invited to participate in exhibitions such as Creative Britain - The Festival of British Media and Design last year – and the British Council’s Home Sweet Home, an exhibition celebrating contemporary British designs for the home.

And the secret of Hitch Mylius’s success? Well, it’s certainly not its founder’s cut-throat business style. In the 30 years of its existence, Hitch Mylius has never used cheap, tropical timbers in its products, preferring to obtain timber from guaranteed sustainable sources in Europe. Its upholstering is still a mainly hand-crafted process due to the size of the batches and the demands of the designs. “Other companies take a rectangle of fabric, pull it over a sofa and snip it, tweak it and staple it, whereas our method is to make a cover that fits perfectly and slips over the sofa like a well-fitting glove,” says Mylius.

And the future will probably consist of “more of the same”, he says, “because that’s where all our factory skills are and I want to keep my workforce busy.” This is a workforce that has, in many cases, been with the company since its early days.

Hitch Mylius has a reputation for delivering on time. “It’s a personal thing. These issues are important to me, far more important than churning out lots of furniture. I’ve never been one for building up the business at any cost,” says Mylius. It’s the kind of statement you’d expect from a designer – they are not generally known for their entrepreneurial tendencies – and Mylius, who trained in furniture design at the then Hornsey College of Art and worked at Pentagram in the late Sixties says: “I don’t consider myself to be a businessman.”

Mylius always intended to bring in a manager to look after the business side of things but somehow never found the right person. “Maybe I’m one of those people who finds it difficult to let go. I’ve always done what I wanted to do in the way that I wanted to do it, even when it wasn’t that fashionable,” he declares. However, it may be the absence of a business manager cutting costs here and aggressively marketing there, that keeps the firm in business. “I’m not interested in selling products for the sake of it. I want to sell products that people want because they’re beautiful designs,” says Mylius. Some of his very first designs are still bestsellers today.

Maintaining integrity while building a successful business is quite some achievement, particularly for one who set up his company in 1971 by carting his homemade products around in a van. Big breaks came when Hitch Mylius won a contract to supply Liberty of London’s modern furniture department in 1972, and two years later when it began supplying The Conran Shop. The company moved in 1995 to its present modern factory premises, transformed by the Pike Practice from a Fifties’ building in Enfield.

Mylius sees the latest collaboration with darlings of the design world, Shin and Tomoko Azumi, as something of a “birthday project”.

Mylius had admired the playful, theatrical qualities of the Azumi’s work for some time and “thought they’d be good people to work with”. The range, currently at the prototype stage, comprises modular seating units that can be used together to create one long, continuous and symmetrical seating arrangement, or used alone as individual, asymmetric sofas.

“When we design something we always look at the entertainment aspect as well as the functionality of the object,” say Shin and Tomoko. “This time, we tried to create an object that looks almost free from gravity. People usually have a preconception that upholstered furniture is big and heavy. We tried to create a visual trick to float this bulky object.” Their design will be launched at 100% Design in September.