Thomas Elfe Thomas Elfe Elfe was born in 1719 in London, England. He was an accomplished and prolific furniture and cabinet craftsman of the American colonial period. Elfe, a contemporary of Thomas Chippendale, was considered Charleston's best furniture craftsman of the eighteenth century. His working career spanned almost thirty years from about 1746 to 1775. At one point in his career his personal worth was a fortune of over 6,200 English pounds. Local Charleston historian and one time director of the Charleston Museum, E. Milby Burton (1889–1977), attributed Elfe as the craftsman of some of the finest nationally acclaimed furniture produced. Burton's
Matthew Hilton (designer) Matthew Hilton (designer) Matthew Hilton (born 1957) is a British furniture designer of "modern" furniture and lighting. Hilton attended Portsmouth College of Art and then Kingston Polytechnic graduating in 1979. After graduation he was an industrial designer and model maker until 1984. In 1991, he designed the "Balzac Armchair" for SCP Limited, a company started by Sheridan Coakley in 1985 and now based in Shoreditch, London. Between 2000 and 2004 Hilton was Habitat's Head of Furniture design, and his furniture is held in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Geffrye Museum, London, and the Manchester