Lucienne Day, who has died aged 93, was the foremost British textile designer of her period. Day's furnishing fabrics, of which the most famous was the Festival of Britain abstract pattern Calyx, hung in every "contemporary" living room in Britain. The reality of "art for the people", dreamed about by the Victorian William Morris, was finally achieved by a female designer in the middle of the 20th century.
Lucienne drew on the English tradition of patterns based on plant forms that went back as far as Morris. She took motifs drawn from nature – flowers, grasses, shoots, the intricate patterns of the landscape – and transformed them into something absolutely new. Part of their success was the implied message of regrowth and optimism for a Britain only just recovering from war.
She was also deeply influenced by European abstract painting. Her textiles speak the visual language of Kandinsky, Miró and Klee. It pleased her to think that people who could not afford to buy a painting for their living room could at least own a pair of abstract patterned curtains. Many of Day's printed fabrics were made in long production runs, which kept the price affordable. She made the link between mass production and fine art.
Born Désirée Lucienne Conradi, she was brought up in the comfortable south London suburbs. Her mother was English and her father Belgian. She went to a convent school and always kept a distinctly continental reticence and chic. From a very early age she was focused on designing, and studied at Croydon School of Art and then, from 1937 to 1940, at the Royal College of Art. It was there, in her final year, that she first met the furniture designer Robin Day.
Decades later they were still, very touchingly, describing that meeting as the start of a true romance. Perhaps the secret lay in Lucienne's professional autonomy. Their partnership was often, wrongly, compared to that of their contemporary American designers Charles and Ray Eames. Ray Eames's professional work was merged with, and in some degree subsidiary to, her husband's, whereas Lucienne's career was always distinct.
Lucienne set out on her career at a period when design was only just beginning to emerge as a recognisable profession. In that sense she was a pioneer. Her first freelance designs were for dress fabrics. But she quickly moved into the more democratic area of furnishing fabrics, broadening her scope to include carpets, wallpapers and table linens. Her work formed part of what she later described as a "tremendous surge of vitality" after the war. Her success was part and parcel of the Homes for the People movement, the Britain Can Make It exhibition, and the proselytising spirit of the Council of Industrial Design.
Calyx, the first design that brought her real fame, was exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951. A large expanse of it hung in the Homes and Gardens pavilion, in the "contemporary" dining room designed by Robin. The pattern of free-floating cusps or mushroom caps, Lucienne's fresh interpretation of the geometry of nature, was screen-printed on linen. The original colouring – so redolent of the festival – was sharp yellow, orange, black and white on an olive ground.
Heal's Fabrics were the manufacturers of Calyx. So unconfident were they of its success that they paid only half of the £20 that Lucienne had wanted to charge for the design. They had the decency to pay her the other £10 later, once the pattern had won a gold medal at the Milan Triennale and the international design award of the American Institute of Decorators. Day was the first British designer ever to have won this very influential American award.
Calyx was followed by the related pattern Flotilla, a subtle composition of marine abstract shapes. This was printed on rayon "for people who like Calyx but have smaller windows and purses", as Lucienne said at the time. It retailed at 16s 9d (84p) a yard and was chosen for the budget "People's House" at the Ideal Home exhibition in 1952.
Lucienne's collaboration with Heal's Fabrics continued for another 20 years and – as with Robin's enduring relationship with Hille, the furniture manufacturers – became one of the legendary partnerships of 20th-century British design. She was also designing fabrics for Edinburgh Weavers and British Celanese, carpets for Tomkinsons and Royal Wilton, wallpapers for Crown and an enormously successful range of glass cloths for Thomas Somerset. You still sometimes spot the ghosts of these in aged kitchens, and they were recently relaunched by the fashion designer and modernism enthusiast Margaret Howell. With her wallpapers for the German firm of Rasche and her patterns for Rosenthal ceramics, Lucienne was one of Britain's rare international stars. She was much in demand to serve on the many international design juries of the time.
Through the 1950s, Lucienne's designs became gradually more linear, reminiscent of Ben Nicholson's paintings and the pottery of the Swedish designer Stig Lindberg. She played with new typography – as in Graphics, another famous prizewinning design – and with ancient calligraphy, in Runic and Script. She introduced small sticklike figures in her rather eerie double-take design Spectators.
In the 1960s, she moved on to blocks, zigzags and stripes of pure bright colour, the equivalent of Patrick Heron's paintings of that period. Her designs were usually made in gouache on paper, and are works of art in themselves: the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, has a considerable collection.
My first meeting with Lucienne was in the early 1960s, only weeks after I had been appointed the Guardian's design correspondent. I remember it as nerve-wracking to visit her and Robin in the house in Chelsea I had so often seen in the "lifestyle" features then burgeoning in newspapers and magazines. The Days had even been featured in an advertisement for Smirnoff vodka: Lucienne disconcertingly resembled the young Vivien Leigh. The design stars were less alarming than I had imagined, Lucienne displaying a reassuring streak of practicality.
In the 1970s, Lucienne made a risky transition from industrial design to craft. At the time she was consultant to the John Lewis department stores and had been commissioned to design a set of five shutter doors for the store in Newcastle. Seeing the designs on her drawing board, an architect friend assumed these were designs for embroidery. Day's "silk mosaic" tapestries evolved from there. Made in a technique developed from traditional patchwork, they are abstract patterns built up with tiny pieces of shot silk, often as small as one centimetre square, which glow and shimmer.
Working with two assistants, Lucienne was involved in the construction of her tapestries as well as the designing. Some were sold privately or given to friends; some were made to commission. One of the most spectacular is the tapestry known as the Window (1986), commissioned for the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster – a huge abstract colour-burst commemorating a designer whose life revolved around texture and colour.
Lucienne was too shy to find public roles easy. But she saw the importance of female visibility in a largely male-dominated profession. Only the fifth woman to be elected to the elite Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry, she became the first female Master (1987-89). She steeled herself to get through the occasions when she had to preside at a dinner or make a platform speech. Five years later she was succeeded by another iconic female master, the fashion designer Jean Muir, and one always sensed a certain rivalry between the design world's two grandes dames.
Lucienne was a woman of rare talent and great courage. Her personal achievement was triumphally revealed in the Days' joint retrospective exhbition at the Barbican Centre, London, in 2001. She balanced a demanding career, a secure domestic life and the upbringing of her much-loved daughter Paula at a time when such a balance was anything but usual: women designers everywhere are in her debt. She is survived by Robin and Paula.