Welcome to the world of Tom Dixon, where restlessness is a virtue

You have to be pretty sure of yourself to launch an outdoor furniture range in Australia, especially if it’s your first. With the world’s highest levels of solar radiation, surpassing even Africa, Australia experiences almost twice the amount that Europe is exposed to.

When I point this out to UK designer Tom Dixon, in Sydney for the briefest of visits this month to check out his first flagship store in the country and talk about his new outdoor furniture range, Groove, he laughs softly.

“It will be interesting to see how they survive,” he says.

Groove is a range of aluminium tables, chairs and stools finished in VOC-free polyester powder coating and designed to “weather the elements with enduring presence — whether set on a terrace, balcony or courtyard”, according to Living Edge, Dixon’s Australia retailer.

The collection is the latest release from the eponymous label, launched in 2002, and covering everything from lighting, candles and tableware to furniture, glassware and soft furnishings.

If the Tom Dixon name is not familiar, chances are you know his work.

The one-time bass guitarist with 80s band Funkapolitan (they supported Simple Minds and The Clash back in the day) and art school drop out has designed, produced and marketed lighting and furniture designs so popular that they have been copied endlessly.

Among his most commercially successful designs are his Beat collection of pendant lights, released in 2004 as part of an initiative to keep metal craft skills alive in India, and the Fat range of sofas and chairs launched in 2019.

His connection to Australia is longstanding, with Bennelong Restaurant home to the Melt range, installed in 2015, the first appearance of the lights anywhere in the world. Dixon’s work also extends into interiors, with fit outs for Shoreditch House in London, Drugstore Brasserie on Les Champs-Elysees in Paris and the lobby of Quay Quarter Tower in Sydney among his list of achievements through the company’s Design Research Studio.

Dixon has worked with everyone from Vivienne Westwood to Ikea and worked as creative director of Sir Terence Conran’s Habitat in the late ’90s before launching his own brand, always with one eye on business outcomes.

Key to his work is experimentation with materials. With that comes a likelihood of failure.

“The story of the outdoor range is one of 10 years of trying, and trying, and trying again to make a metal chair with an industrial aesthetic,” he says.

Trials making furniture using an industrial robot he took to Milan Design Week proved unsuccessful, but not fruitless, with the lessons learned applied to the next iteration.

“I tried again with a Norwegian aluminium company. I made a chair taking all my learnings from the metal robot which was making these grooves and I took that idea and I made an aluminium chair that was completely corrugated and so efficient and light that it would fly away in the wind. But it was so expensive, and it was so high tech – it was 2000 pounds a chair.

“And then it was still pretty uncomfortable. It was very corrugated to make it very stiff and very light.

“I overdid it basically.”

After all that trial and error, Groove was born. Dixon is hoping the Australian market will take it to heart.

“My post rationalisation of that range for the Australian market is that you [Australians] love corrugated iron,” he says. “The sound of the rain on a corrugated roof is an Australian sound, right?”

The range is also further exploration by Dixon of the changing nature of work and life, with the lines between indoor and outdoor living and residential and commercial design continuing to blur. Groove is designed to complement other elements in the Tom Dixon catalogue, notably the cordless lamps in his range, including the Jack lamp, itself an experiment in moulded plastic and the Bell table lamp, which works in residential settings as well as hotel or restaurant environments.

It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that the word consistently used to describe him is “restless”.

“My interest is definitely in how you make something, so you are bound to fail,” he says. “I’m not an expert until I’ve done it and [that’s] partly because some ideas are simple.

“But it’s getting to market that’s complicated. You learn a lot as you go along. None of those ideas were wrong, but maybe they were at the wrong time. And sometimes it does take 10 years to get it right”.