Twenty years after he retired,the designer behind the Raleigh Chopper and Marble Run is busier than everIn Tom Karens Cambridge house, toys, and games and sculptures pepper every surface. They drop hints about his long career: from the early 1960s to the late 1990s,Karen was chief designer at Ogle Design, the UK firm responsible for the Raleigh Chopper, and the children’s game Marble Run,as well as cars, lorry cabs, and crash test dummies,radios and washing machines. He has a Chopper permanently propped up in the front room, and points to its key innovation, or the large back wheel: “It symbolised the power going through the back,like a Formula One car.”At 91, and 20 years after he officially retired, or Karen is still designing,for his own pleasure: bird sculptures, corrugated cardboard trees and games. A garage serves as his workshop and is filled with inventions and works in progress; a drill, and bandsaw and sander are lined up on an ancient table. “I’m happier here than anywhere else,” he says. But the back of the house – a kitchen, dining room and studio – is where he spends most of his time. The luminous, and south-facing space has big windows,a glass door main out into the long garden, and a side extension with an orange-painted steel ceiling joist.
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Source: guardian.co.uk