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Photograph by Henry Bourne
WORK THIS WAY Designer Tom Dixon outside his studio on Portobello Dock, with some of the pieces he launched at April's Salone del Mobile in Milan.
In a Venn diagram of superstar British designer Tom Dixon, he would occupy the space where design, industry, craft and technology all intersect. That intersection is most apparent at his mini empire at Portobello Dock, a converted Victorian wharf, which he moved into three years ago.
This deceptively peaceful spot, with tall windows overlooking the glittering Grand Union Canal, brings under one roof all that Dixon loves. There's a tea shop, Tart, where we sit on a sunny spring day to chat about his 30-year career over old-fashioned English tea, complete with vintage china teapots, loose-leaf tea and homemade cakes.
The Dock also houses Dixon's design studio and his eponymous shop, where he sells the lighting and furniture he makes next door. Then there is the restaurant, Dock Kitchen, which he co-owns with rising-star chef Stevie Parle, 26, who trained at the River Cafe and Moro. The eclectic menu is also a merging of worlds, drawing on traditional English cuisine, as well as food from Sri Lanka, the Middle East and Japan.
As for Tart, it is his first Dixon & Daughter enterprise, run by his elder daughter, Florence, and her business partner, Aoibheann Callely. I put it to Dixon that with his love of food, texture and music, he is something of a sensualist. "A sensibilist?" he recoils. "Absolutely not!"
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Courtesy of Tom Dixon
The intricately patterned Etch light
You can blame that miscommunication on a mouthful of Tart's delicious meringue, but there is truth to the idea that Dixon prefers tangible pleasures to purely conceptual ones. Successful designers often inhabit a rarefied world, far removed from industry. Dixon, by contrast, is hands on. He may no longer weld the furniture himself—the process that first brought him to the design world's attention—but he visits every factory he uses and familiarizes himself with every stage of production.
There is nothing in his fashion sense—rumpled tweed jacket and jeans—to suggest his significance on the world stage of design, either. His whole demeanor is understated, as though he wished he could remain quietly anonymous. It is something of a wonder that Florence is now part of the Portobello Dock landscape; for years Dixon refused to say a thing about his home life. It goes without saying that he doesn't much enjoy the spotlight of an interview, but he is generous with his time when you do pin him down. The fact is, he is someone who would much prefer to be doing than talking.
Part French, part Latvian, but mainly British, Dixon, 53, was born in Tunisia but has lived in West London since he was a toddler. The home he shares with his wife, Claudia, and two daughters is not far from the Dock.
At 20, Dixon enrolled in an art-foundation course at Chelsea College of Art & Design but hated it. "Art was too conceptual for me," Dixon says. "I liked making things." Six months later a motorbike accident brought his formal education to an abrupt end and also resulted in a gold tooth that glitters when he laughs. When he recovered, Dixon went out to work—first as a technician, later as a junior animator—before embarking on a brief flirtation with the music business as the bass player in an early-'80s lineup called Funkapolitan (one album and three singles).
As strange a detour as it might seem in hindsight, Funkapolitan taught him more than Chelsea ever did. "There is a do-it-yourself attitude in the music business that I love," he says. "You learn that you don't really need any skill. You can teach yourself an instrument, promote yourself through leaflets, do your own production. All you really need is an attitude." In a funny twist of kismet, Portobello Dock is the former headquarters of Virgin Records, and Dixon's shop was once a studio where the Sex Pistols, Spice Girls and Rolling Stones strutted their stuff.
In 1983, Dixon began to express his own attitude by "tooling around" with welded, salvaged furniture. Soon the raw, rusty work began to attract the eye of the then tiny design community in London. "For me it was alchemy," he recalls. "I was amazed that I could take something that was regarded as rubbish and turn it into cash by the end of the day. I wasn't making much money, but there was a satisfaction and a joy to the work."
London gallerist David Gill remembers going to Dixon's first-ever show, "Creative Salvage," held above a hairdressing salon on Kensington Church Street. "To be honest, I thought it would be a waste of time, but it was so fresh I was really impressed," says Gill. "There was all this furniture made out of reusable metal pieces—old pots, pans and cooking utensils—but I remember thinking it reminded me of Roman shields. It had its own language and identity from the very first."
Not only was Gill among the earliest to commission pieces from the edgy, young talent, but he later collaborated with Dixon on a show at the Frankfurt Furniture fair called "Plastic Fantastic." Dixon transformed plastic salad bowls into geodesic domes and in doing so elevated them to high art.
By the late '80s, Dixon was no longer playing punk outsider to the big boys of design, but rather working with the Italian giant Cappellini, for whom he designed the iconic S-Chair in 1991. He founded his own company, Eurolounge, in 1994, and that same year cemented his position as an established designer with a stackable, four-pronged lighting piece called Jack, which he has described as "a sitting, stacking lighting thing."
The "thing" won him international renown. In 1998 he was appointed head of design at Habitat, then later creative director, staying on as a consultant even after founding his eponymous company in 2002 (he left Habitat in 2008). Ever the multitasker, he was also creative director of the renowned Finnish brand Artek from 2004 to 2009.
Dixon's own brand has yielded quite a few internationally lauded hits, among them the Mirror Ball light (2003), Fresh Fat Chair (2004) and Wingback Chair (2007). He enjoys stripping down forms, emphasizing silhouette or material, as with the voluptuous Plump sofa (2008), a streamlined, space-age version of the classic Chesterfield, or Bulb (2011), an overscaled, energy-efficient lightbulb designed to challenge the aesthetics of most CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) replacements.
His connection to Habitat has often prompted comparisons to Sir Terence Conran, who founded the homeware retailer and is famed for bringing modern design to the masses. And certainly Dixon is a democrat at heart. After all, this is a man who gave away 500 designer polystyrene chairs in Trafalgar Square six years ago. Known as the Great Chair Grab, it was sponsored by Expanded Polystyrene Packaging Group and floated the notion that furniture, like network television, was something you could give away by selling advertising.
He repeated the exercise this April with his metal Stamp Lamp during international design fair Salone del Mobile in Milan. It was there that Dixon orchestrated MOST, an ambitious multidisciplinary festival at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia, which he called a "Glastonbury for design."
“I can see the irony of being driven to give away chairs when other people are selling them for a million dollars apiece”
The remarkable thing about this giveaway was that Dixon made all the Stamp pieces on site using radical laser technology, created with German company Trumpf. He is evangelical about the innovation's possibilities. "Stamp is the 2CV [Citroen's famously low-tech car] of design—very basic and crude—but I wanted to show the magic of designing, making and distributing all in one place," explains Dixon.
The Trumpf machinery allows a piece's size, shape and pattern to be changed to order, making mass customization possible. "It is like the rebirth of the medieval high street," explains Dixon. "In the future, people will tailor-make things for you at a local level and it won't cost that much." Indeed, it challenges the current acceptance of furniture being made halfway around the world and then shipped back at huge cost to the environment, and that's important. Though Dixon wears his eco credentials lightly, his crusade to make low-voltage lighting attractive is second to none, as illustrated by Luminosity, a collection of lamps, lights and shades that he also presented last month in Milan.
He is also well aware that we live on a planet full to bursting with consumer goods. "Each designer has to take his or her own stand on that," he says. "Back in the '60s, it was probably OK to design products that were about newness for the sake of it. I like to think my own work is more about durability and permanence, hence my experiment with cut-steel furniture, which came with a thousand-year guarantee. Or for that matter, the accretion-process chairs."
The latter is a reference to the fact that somewhere off a beach in the Bahamas, there is a colony of undersea chairs, not abandoned, but actually growing.
Dixon has harnessed a process known as mineral accretion—a tool of bioengineering—to subject the chairs to low-voltage charges of solar power that encourage the growth of limestone at something close to three times the usual rate. Once they have acquired a beautiful patina, he will fish them out and let us all share in the magic. He adds, "The scientist [Wolf Hilbertz] who developed this method intended to use it to develop bio concrete. You could literally grow cities in this way."
It's highly imaginative thinking for a designer who still feels some level of outsider status after all these years. He has always been half in and half out of the establishment, and is amused at times by how at odds his ideas are within the elitist field of limited-edition design. "I feel good about my own aesthetic, which is quite raw by comparison," he explains. "But I can see the irony of being driven to give away chairs when other people are selling them for a million dollars apiece."
He admits to never having had a master plan, "but things always seem to work out slightly better than I hoped they would." In truth, his optimism is founded. Backed by Swedish investment company Proventus, he has exported his name and designs to more than 60 countries worldwide. Dixon has weathered the recent stagnant economy, and even grown, increasing his retail presence in North America by roughly 50 percent over the past couple of years. And this month, while showing during New York Design week, from May 17 to 22, he will open a pop-up shop at 45 Bleecker Street, with online design hub Fab.com.
Perhaps not having a plan is an ideal strategy in a field that's always in flux. Certainly, Dixon has seen considerable changes during his career. "On the plus side, it is now universally recognized as a valid, even glamorous, thing to do," he says. "On the minus side, it is not used by people in government to make real change. The planet is full of problems, and who better to harness problem-solving brilliance than designers?"
Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this article gave the incorrect address for the pop-up shop at New York Design week.
