That Magical Moment
Ross Gardam is softly spoken, but with a subtext suggesting he has always known where he’s going, where he’s come from, and why. That’s probably not entirely true, but he certainly gives the impression that every step he has taken in what has been a successful and highly productive career has had its place in the larger scheme, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But if this is the case, it suggests unusual focus from an early age – a focus which is evident in the beautifully resolved products which come out of the studio.
“Like a lot of industrial designers,” he recalls, “I grew up around making objects and building things. My father was an engineer who ran a brick-making factory. So, I was exposed to the manufacturing side of that business. It wasn’t a huge facility, but there was a metalwork workshop and a timber workshop. I spent a lot of time there tinkering.”
At high school he took a subject called technology which, he says, he enjoyed and “felt like a good fit”. It seemed logical to move into the industrial design program at Monash University which he found “really interesting because it took you through art history and design and ran across quite technical aspects”. But however clear-eyed he may have been, he didn’t at that time envisage owning his own furniture and lighting business.
In fact, on graduation and for the next seven years he worked in two areas which he has largely left behind: interior retail design and environmental design (outdoor space, wayfinding and signage).
This he did first with a couple of companies in Melbourne, then in London for two smaller, but similar companies. “I had spent my adult life in Melbourne, so I wanted to experience being in a different city,” he explains. “I had travelled a lot by that stage. I had travelled to 20 or 30 cities by the time I went to London. It wasn’t a sense of wanting to travel, it was living in a different space.”
After two years in London, Gardam decided it was time to do his own thing. He returned to Melbourne in 2007 and started his own practice, which was initially a continuation of the environmental design consultancy, Spaceleft, which he had established in London but with a greater emphasis on product design.
The name came from the idea of looking at the space left around a problem, or the space around an object which helps to define that object. For the first two or three years he continued to do interior work, which he enjoyed, but also aimed to develop two or three products a year. These, he explains, were very much experimental pieces, “mainly around material use and single-process manufacturing”.