INTERIORS: SCRATCH ME IF YOU CAN

"IS YOUR KITCHEN a happy place?" asks a 1954 magazine advertisement for decorative laminated plastic. "Is it as bright and colourful to work in as it might be? Think what a difference Formica would make ..." And then it goes on at length about "friendly" clean-at-a-wipe surfaces ("no more scrubbing and polishing!"), curved counter tops, heat and stain resistance, thrifty lifetime investments and cheering "jewel bright" colours.

I don't subscribe to the "life with Formica is bliss" stuff but I do recall that plastic laminates used to come in some rather groovy designs as well as glorious colours. Black powdered with a polychrome of nightclub glitter, checks, stripes, crazes and pebble dashes, oozing splodges and linear abstracts boomeranging across seas of salmon pink, the material offered a vast range of chip proof textiles for table tops, as well as the last word in modern hygiene.

My own Sixties kitchen table is surfaced with a pale yellow number, sprinkled with a bundle of spindly lines and tiny dots in black and sparkling gold. This modest ensemble of varnished pine, adhesive Warerite (a Swedish Formica lookalike) has been lugged from home to home with me ever since my parents threw it out over 15 years ago. It has survived more than 30 years of heavy use without a scratch and, in a retro-chic sort of way, even the design has endured.

Original Formica-clad tables are now collectable icons of the Fifties and Sixties, but with furniture's current vogue for clean, solid colour and postmodern forms with industrial, man-made finishes, laminated plastic surely has a bright future, as well as a past.

Pioneered by two young research engineers, Herbert Faber and Daniel O'Conor, the first laminate sheet was produced in 1910 at Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh, by impregnating canvas with liquid Bakelite. Canvas was rapidly superseded by paper and during its formative inter-war years it was primarily used in industry as a component of automobiles and aircraft, military radio sets and insulation. In the Thirties, Formica moved into decorative furnishing surfaces with a redeveloped manufacturing process that still, in essence, survives - layers of printed craft and alpha cellulose papers, soaked in phenolic and melamine resins, sandwiched into thick rigid sheets with heat and high pressure hydraulics.

In the early days, black, pearl and woodgrain laminate panels lined the interiors of the Queen Mary, the lobby of Holabird and Root's A&O Smith building in Chicago and Union Pacific railroad coaches, but Formica's coming of age was in the development of decorative colour - classic designs such as Moonglo, Skylark and Batik - and its pervasive move from the counter tops of 1930s American diners into the post-war home.

According to the definitive work on the subject, Formica & Design, From the Counter Top to High Art, by Susan Grant Lewin, Formica owes its success to the simplicity and "chameleon-like surface" of what the book describes as "the quintessential American vernacular material".

Formica was introduced to the British market in 1947 - along with symbiotic Americanisms such as the kitchen dinette and the bathroom Vanitory unit - and, 50 years later, the company's South Shields factory is still churning out miles of laminate. Recent innovations include embossed, textured and high-tech metallic surfaces, but the public perception of Formica, now used as a generic term for all plastic laminates, is still stuck in an era when stay at home Wonderwife trotted around the kitchen in spiky stilettos, an hourglass frock, lift-and-separate bra and frilly New Look pinny, serving cocktails with one hand and whisking cake mix with the other.

Post-war marketing traded on the drudgery-free domestics that underpinned the most primitive form of women's liberation. There is no denying that plastic laminates were elemental to a revolution in kitchen design, but the notion that a sky blue work-top could turn housework in to a leisure activity didn't last long. Formica is still a touch defensive about its past, largely because it has proved so difficult to shake off. "It's a two-sided coin," says John Hodkinson, Formica Limited's northern European marketing manager. "In terms of brand recognition, around 95 per cent of people associate laminates with Formica, but many of them still remember their dad gluing sheets of it onto table tops with Evo-Stick." Indeed, a 1954 advertisement invited homeowners to ask for a do-it-yourself leaflet showing how you could make an ordinary kitchen table into a "thing of beauty". It is hard to remember a plastic laminate commercial with a more contemporary message. There was the Sixties "Formica Girl" wearing a little black mini-dress, polka-dotted with big circles of those jewel- bright colours, but where did it go from there?

Hodkinson admits that Formica's image suffered a period of decline from the 1970s onwards. When kitchens moved into stripped pine purism, plasticised pseudo wood grains failed to compete and Formica became an idiom for suburban DIY kitsch, dumped as a man-made, has-been along with Fablon, furry Nylons and vinyl leatherette. Formica argues that "dramatic" technological advances and a more industrialised furnishing market are the most significant factors behind its abdigated public profile. The company gradually withdrew from the retail market and concentrated exclusively on volume, contract supplies, selling to kitchen and furniture manufacturers via a network of wholesale distributors. Aside from a range of pre-formed worktops available in a limited choice of "porridgey" colours and surfaces of mass produced kitchens, plastic laminates are less likely to be seen in the home than in public toilets, petrol stations, airports and ship and shop fittings.

In the early 1980s, with the introduction of ColorCore (a solid, etchable, through-colour laminate which dispenses with the material's brown core), Formica teamed up with Italian competitor, Abet Laminati, to promote liaisons with architects and furniture designers. Following two multi-discipline, big name, one- off product exhibitions - "Surface and Ornament" in Milan in 1983 and "Post Modern" at the V&A in 1984 - the material enjoyed a fleeting renaissance. Another is about to surface.

Formica's ColorSystem range includes a rich palette of matt and textured shades from Chrome Yellow and Tropical Blue to a limey French Green and oh so wonderful Clementine. The new Decometals include brushed, embossed and coloured aluminiums, coppers, chromes and hammered pewters. Serigrafica reinvents classic designs, such as Boomerang and Softglow. There are marbled and glitzy mirrored surfaces, a collection of original Fifties patterns are going into reproduction later this year, and Terence Conran has entered the fray with a range of four new designs for Formica competitors Polyrey.

"As a vehicle to carry colour and design, there's nothing like it," says John Hodkinson. A number of pioneers among the Britpack of young contemporary furniture designers actively agree with him, although products by Abet Laminati and Polyrey tend to be their chosen material. "They are cheaper and offer a bigger choice of colours," says Steve Jensen of design group Juggernaut, adding that Formica is still king of the woodgrain. "The walnut is particularly good - and very Wallpaper*," he says.

The "juicy fruit drench of colour" in Juggernaut's Polo Collection, a range of furniture including a wheely desk and TV trolley, is achieved with plastic laminates. (Juggernaut sold the manufacturing rights to a Japanese company and the collection is no longer available in Britain.) Michael Young's spun aluminium and tapered steel occasional table features a laminated surface in a choice of colours. And in the case of furniture designer, Owain George, his hallmark materials are modern plastics.

"When I'm designing a space," says George, "I start with a piece of Formica and work from there." (He is using the generic here, because, actually, he starts with a swatch of Abet Laminati.) In the retro Juice Bar in Notting Hill, he used wall-to-wall plastic laminates in orange and lime green; in Daniel Poole's flat, he created a capsule bedroom lined with silver metallics; and in L'Equipe Anglaise (a private members club in west London) he used a ribbed aluminium. His rolling, coasting chaise longue is made of canary yellow laminates and sheets of real aluminium.

JAM, a three person design team who specialise in "perceiving materials within new contexts" have produced furniture and accessories from washing machine drums and Zotefoams and Polyformes (otherwise known as swimming pool floats). Formica is on their hit list of under-exploited materials with potential. "I think people still see it as a Fifties covering for kitchens," says JAM's Jamie Anley. "We want to take a fresh look at laminates." But will Formica collaborate?

"We are very keen to keep in touch with fashion trends," says Formica's European design manager, Ruth Hewett, who confesses that the company "has not been good at it in the past". There is a problem in that the production process is now so industrialised (she compares it to volume newspaper printing) that it is difficult to respond to small orders. "If an individual just wants 10 sheets of zany purple laminate, it can't be done," says Hewett. "The big distributors call the shots they tend to be very conservative. In design terms, anything is possible, but what goes into production has to be justified by sales figures. That approach needs to change."

The company has matured, she says, but in the manner of an old man, who still likes to wear beige flannel suits because that's what he's always worn. "This is a slow moving industry, but technology's got to catch up with fashion. There's new blood in the system, and I think Formica's going to come back with a vengeance."

! Susan Grant Lewin's `Formica & Design, From High Art to Counter Culture' is published by Rizzoli, New York, priced pounds 29.95. Owain George: 0171 820 1974