“I was born in Tunisia,” British furniture designer Tom Dixon tells me when we meet. “I lived in Rabat and Suez. Obviously that’s not here,” he says gesturing around to the general space at Dubai Design Week last month. “But culturally, linguistically and religiously, there are similarities. I’ve not really spent any time here, so it’s nice to discover it.”
In town to speak at an event, Dixon is not your average designer. Entirely self-taught, he has spent more than four decades producing a fearless and eclectic body of work, from industrial-style furniture to hotel interiors. Curious, restless and averse to formality, he has launched a design laboratory (“Space”); served as creative director of popular UK furniture store Habitat; opened The Manzoni – a Milanese restaurant designed down to the last detail – and established his own brand in 2002, followed by his architecture and interiors studio in 2007.
In 2000, Dixon received an OBE royal honour for his services to design from Queen Elizabeth II. Today, his studio spans cities such as London, Milan, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai and Hangzhou, and his work sits in the permanent collections of major museums.
The path looks linear, he says, but it wasn’t. Though many online profiles list him as a graduate of Chelsea Art School, he laughs at the idea. “I tried art school for about six months because I didn’t know what else to do. Then I had a motorbike accident, broke my leg and never went back.”
Part of London’s underground music scene in the early 1980s, Dixon became the bass player in disco outfit Funkapolitan. “For two years, I was a professional bass player. Then I had another motorbike accident and broke my arm.” Dropped from the band, he watched a “much better player” take his place and later perform with Madonna, Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd. “That could have been my destiny if I hadn’t had an accident, right?”
Instead, he channelled his energy into making furniture, welding salvage metal into new forms. Initially only “making things for fun”, he began selling pieces to friends. “It grew organically very quickly. I never went back to music.”
By 1987, he had created the Fish Pan chair – assembled from welded pots, pans and ladles – followed by collaborations with Cappellini, which yielded the sinuous S chair, its curved steel softened with woven rush; as well as the Pylon chair, a lattice of intersecting metal lines resembling an electricity pylon.
Today, he has designed thousands of products and works out of a former coalyard in London’s King’s Cross, producing everything from furniture and perfume to stackable marble candlesticks and the Melt pendant, inspired by the interior of a glacier. Materials – polished metal, tubular aluminium, brushed oak, moulded glass, cork mixed with resin – are deployed with intelligence, while fabrics come textured and slubbed. The effect is a visual language that is as distinct as it is avant-garde.
The functional beauty of these designs is what brings him to Dubai, under the wing of Huda Lighting. “What we sell is hoping to go into bars, hotels, restaurants, as well as into homes. It mirrors what happens here. There’s a lot of construction and building in a way that isn’t really around in Europe. It looks like Shanghai maybe 15 years ago – people from all backgrounds and cultures are here because there’s opportunity. That feels positive compared to the old world at the moment,” he says. With Europe and the US feeling sluggish, Dixon – like many others – is looking towards the GCC. “You can’t just chuck product at a place and hope it’ll stick. We need to be here.”
With his shock of grey curls and Savile Row suit worn sans socks, perhaps no one is more surprised that he earns a living breaking the rules than Dixon himself. “I never had an ambition to be a designer. I didn’t really know anything about designing. I like making things. That could be anything – music or food – it’s about the joy of creation.”
His refusal to be bound by discipline or medium fuels his work. “I’m kind of agnostic. ‘Design’ is a pretty flabby word that covers all kinds of activities. If I were doing fashion, interiors or software design, they’re not the same profession, but they all fall under this umbrella. It allows me to never get bored.”
While many designers benefit from prestigious colleges and well-connected tutors, Dixon did it alone. “My only qualification is an A-level in pottery.” A student at a failing London secondary school, he found refuge in the wood, metal and ceramics workshops. “I came out literally with one A-level,” he tells me.
Selling ceramic tobacco pipes to his classmates at only age 15, Dixon was already entrepreneurial. “Turning play into something functional probably had an impact on me.”
Decades later, he still craves the physicality of making. “I like making the full-sized model and welding is very good for that because you’re making a real structure. Metal is very plastic in a way that you shape it, reshape it, put it together and break it apart. It suits the impatience in me.”
His lack of formal education, he believes, freed him. “I wasn’t fearful. Students today see commerce as separate from what they do. They think it’s someone else’s job. I never had that separation. I make something, I sell it, then I make the next.”
This practical mindset accidentally created one of his best-known lights. Sent by the British Council to Lagos and Jaipur to work with street artisans, he was too busy to go, so he dispatched 10 students instead. They returned with designs artisans couldn’t produce – “stuff too complicated and too cerebral”.
Dixon stepped in, recalling local craftsmen who made brass water-pots. Using their hammering techniques on redesigned forms, he created the Beat Fat pendant. “It came from dissatisfaction with the students’ work and seeing those pots could be repurposed.
“I like chaos theory,” the designer says. “I’m good at spotting a pattern in chaos. I wouldn’t say there was always a plan, but I can spot an opportunity – or create one.”
Now viewed as an industry veteran, Dixon still resists the label. “My two accidents made me an accidental designer. I never intended it. It was a hobby that became a much better way of earning a living than music or art. And we get to make things, right?”
