Chewing over instrumental ideas

Hoop La! Meet the Right Hand Lady. She adorns a roll of wallpaper and is taken from a 1968 lithograph called Icarus by Allan Jones. The wallpaper is one of the 335 lots up for auction at Bonhams in London’s Knightsbridge as part of its biannual Twentieth Century Furniture & Design jamboree. Other goodies include classic furniture, tableware and textiles. The sale is on 4 February. For more details call 0171-393 3900.

Twenty years ago, Harley Street dentist Dr Eddy Levin was having teething problems. He spent many sleepless nights worrying about the false teeth he was designing. “No matter how much I studied I just couldn’t make them look natural.” Then he was struck by a ring of confidence – the Principle of Golden Proportion, subject of books by Le Corbusier and a familiar concept to architects. He swiftly designed the Golden Mean Gauge, a tool to measure perfect proportion for absolutely any design project, which he’s been refining ever since. “Designers can even use it for logos, if they find the dominant line looks wrongly proportioned,” explains Levin.

The only problem is, the Golden Mean Gauge looks like one of those nasty instruments Jeremy Irons used to massacre his mirror-image in Dead Ringers.