Unusual Conclusions – Tom Dixon in Conversation at Living Edge

Given Tom Dixon’s global success, it is hard to believe that his career as a designer was largely unintentional. In fact, becoming a rockstar was likelier (in his early 20s, his band toured with The Clash and Simple Minds) until a motorcycle accident put an end to his musical endeavours, and his bandmates replaced him. One to generally “go with the flow”, Tom was unperturbed and, inspired by the “vibrant and crazy” nightclub scene he had experienced in New York while on tour, he looked to create the same back home, unknowingly kickstarting his trajectory as a designer. In Australia in March to celebrate 20 years of his eponymous brand and launch PORTABLES – a new series of compact, rechargeable lights – with Living Edge, he reflected on his unlikely origin story.

In the 1980s, London’s nightlife attracted a melting pot of creativity; Tom’s network spanned fashion designers, photographers, artists, hairdressers and more. As he says, “I never really wanted to be the same as anybody else and by being active in music, sculpture and welding – and all kinds of clubs – I just sort of met people.” He adds, “when I teach, I say to go to more parties because that’ll be your network. And that’s what happened with clubs – I had this super extended network.” He began welding on stage as a sort of performance art turned live act and the nightclub’s clientele started purchasing his work. “Sometimes I’d be welding on stage just to produce activity and sometimes we’d do an exhibition, so it was very loose and chaotic but for me it was amazing that people were buying things, and it meant I got a lot of practice,” he reflects.

“I never really wanted to be the same as anybody else and by being active in music, sculpture and welding – and all kinds of clubs – I just sort of met people.” Tom adds, “when I teach, I say to go to more parties because that’ll be your network. And that’s what happened with clubs – I had this super extended network.”

Tom credits this “readymade clientele” for the momentum he experienced in the early stages of his career. For instance, while working from a studio space in Vauxhall, a hairdresser friend from his nightclub days approached him to design and fabricate a collection of chairs and mirrors for their salon. The chair Tom designed was the very first iteration of the now-iconic S-Chair for Cappellini. It was significantly more industrial and utilitarian in aesthetic compared to the refined silhouette of today, and the tire tubing upholstery was polarising; as Tom says, “no one wanted to sit on second hand rubber,” but it encompassed the same design principles as the now widely regarded piece.

After evolving the design into “something much more elegant” with a wooden frame and a woven seat, Tom produced a run of 100. As he says, “it started being seen around”, and upon a visit to Tom’s studio, it caught Cappellini’s eye. “They were sick of the Italian work – it was the end of post modernism – and they were looking for freshness.” This off-handed recollection of a significant moment in his career epitomises Tom’s intriguing insouciance – an attribute he still possesses today. “I wasn’t actively courting it,” he explains. “I was having a lot of parties in the studio, employing 15 people, welding; it was unusual, and people would hear about it and come and visit.” While Tom’s incomparable skill as a designer lies at the heart of his enduring presence in the industry, it seems much of the attention he garnered as an emerging talent could be credited to an intrigue around the peculiarity of his approach.

“London’s not a beautiful city, but it’s so varied, and it has the breadth of world class expertise,” Tom says, adding, “it never got the depth of, say, Milan in terms of furniture or Paris in terms of fashion or New York in terms of art, but it has that kind of unassailable breadth that I don’t think any other city has enough critical mass to match.”

Further, while Tom’s curious and creative mind would have no doubt found success anywhere, the distinctive landscape of London in the late-1980s feels very much integral to his story. As he reflects, off the back of a recession, London was “pretty grim”, but it was also “cheap and interesting”, attracting creatives from Europe, Japan and more searching for the inimitable grit and grunge emblematic of London at that time. “Issey Miyake would come over, or Rei Kawakubo for inspiration for Comme des Garçons and they’d see these people like Vivienne Westwood – slightly nutty people – and they found that inspiring.” He continues, “London’s not a beautiful city, but it’s so varied, and it has the breadth of world-class expertise. It never got the depth of, say, Milan in terms of furniture or Paris in terms of fashion or New York in terms of art, but it has that kind of unassailable breadth that I don’t think any other city has enough critical mass to match.”

The next few years brought consistent metalwork commissions and exhibitions in New York, Germany and Japan, before Tom welcomed a change of pace upon starting a family, taking on the role of Habitat’s Head of Design. “The HQ was in France, and I spoke French, so I struck lucky, but I also knew craft and Italian industry; I’d had one international hit with the S-Chair, and I was interested in how things were made, so I got the job,” he says with characteristic casualness. With 70 stores across Europe and two design studios – one in London and another in Paris – the scale of the brand was monumental, and Tom recalls it being “impressive in breadth” and “unbelievably fast-paced”. He says, “that was a very different experience and I had to think of ways to make the narrative behind the collections interesting alongside things like packaging, logistics and retail.” Throughout his 10-year tenure – in which he was International Head of Design followed by Creative Director – he was instrumental in reviving the brand while remaining true to founder Terence Conran’s vision.

In 2002 – after a decade of “corporate life” – Tom left Habitat to start his own company. As he explains, “there was clarity about what the model would be, not so much the products.” He elaborates, “I had the perception of celebrating the designer, similar to how the fashion designers of the time did it with their name above the door and the ability to create a whole aesthetic – a world.” Rather than a distributed output, Tom saw an opportunity to curate a brand that encompassed his design philosophy and products and so, with a clarity around the company’s framework, a hunger for creative independence and confidence that the rest would follow, Tom launched his eponymous brand.

The past 20 years have seen Tom Dixon expand to 90 countries around the world with hubs in London, Milan, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai and Hangzhou, and in 2007, the company launched its interior architecture arm, Design Research Studio, which boasts a portfolio of projects to complement the Tom Dixon output. The interiors of the Pullman Hotel in Bercy and Le Drugstore brasserie along Paris’s Les Champs-Élysées are just two of the studio’s projects to date, and it has recently collaborated on Sydney’s newly opened Quay Quarter Tower as well as a residential project with Cera Stribley Architects in Melbourne.

Back in London, the brand’s Kings Cross headquarters, Coal Office, is, in many ways, a culmination of Tom’s extensive career. Conceived as an office, shop, workshop and restaurant – all under the one roof – it is a hybrid space in every sense of the word (Tom has been known to occasionally work in the kitchen as a way of spending a day in someone else’s creative shoes). The space harks back to the designer’s earliest studio days, where a certain fluidity and sociability resulted in unencumbered creativity and discovery. And while it is perhaps slightly more structured today, Tom Dixon the brand feels like a seamless extension of its founder, whose self-proclaimed “unusual conclusions and combinations of things” have a distinctive and lasting resonance.