Peter Waals

Peter Waals (30 January 1870 – May 1937), born Pieter van der Waals, was a Dutch cabinet maker associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.

Born in The Hague to Jan van der Waals and Lena Alida Maria Loorij, Peter Waals was the nephew of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Johannes Diderik van der Waals. Trained as a cabinet maker in his native Netherlands, Waals spent three years working in Brussels, Berlin and Vienna before moving to London where he was introduced to Ernest Gimson in 1901.

Gimson had set up a small workshop in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, and then at Daneway House at Sapperton, making furniture, turned chairs, and metalwork to his own designs. Waals was offered the position of foreman/manager and chief cabinet maker and accepted, spending the rest of his life in the Cotswolds. The furniture and craft work produced by the workshop under the day-to-day supervision of Waals is regarded as a supreme achievement of the Arts and Crafts movement of its period and is well represented in the principal collections of the decorative arts in Britain and the United States of America. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner called Gimson "the greatest of the English artist-craftsmen."

After Gimson's death in 1919 Peter Waals continued to run the Daneway Workshops. By the end of the year he was canvassing potential clients in his own name on Daneway headed paper The following year he was able to set up his own workshop at Halliday's Mill with the help of Alfred James, at the foot of Cowcombe Hill in the nearby village of Chalford, employing many of Gimson's skilled craftsmen including designer Norman Jewson. Chalford was a more practical location for a workshop than Sapperton, since it was close to a railway station and had more accessible roads.

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