Jasper was born in Chelsea’s ‘World’s End’ neighbourhood in 1959, the middle child of three siblings. His father worked in advertising, at the then number one agency J. Walter Thompson. As the company policy was to move young executives around, the family moved first to live in upstate New York and then to Frankfurt, Germany. Jasper’s mother was interested in cooking and worked for a number of chefs, testing recipes for their cookery books. While the family lived in Germany, at age eight Jasper was sent back to England to attend a preparatory boarding school called Vinehall in East Sussex. From there he went on to another boarding school, Bryanston School in Dorset.
Jasper’s maternal grandfather had been the head of Danish Bacon in Britain. One room of his grandfather’s house was furnished in the early 1960s in a modern, Scandinavian style with objects acquired during his trips to Denmark. This room made a deep impression on Jasper as a child. One of the objects in the room was a Braun ‘Snow White’s coffin’ record player, designed by Dieter Rams. It later became Jasper’s. The drawing below shows the record player in Jasper’s room at boarding school, with the lamp reflected in its lid.
It was the only room in the house which was modern. My grandfather was interested in art and he painted, as a hobby, but he must have said to himself: ‘Oh, one room I will do modern’. So he had a Braun record player, white ‘shag pile’ carpets with long hair on a light wooden floor, and modern furniture. Each time we visited my grandparents I’d end up in that room. I couldn’t explain it at the time but looking back I realised that the atmosphere of that light, airy space, without any of the over-stuffed upholstery and claustrophobia of carpets and curtains of typical English living rooms of that time, was an improvement. I was aware of feeling better in that space than elsewhere and later on came to realise that my sense of well being was somehow tied up with how I reacted to my surroundings. The ways in which atmosphere can be improved began to fascinate me and almost certainly led to me becoming a designer later on.
A door handle, a chair, a lamp and Snow White’s coffin, drawn by Jasper of his student room at Bryanston.