‘IT ALL BECOMES VEGETABLE SOUP’
Designer Tom Dixon on the perils of homogeneity
Carving your own path in the design world is harder than ever, says U.K. product designer Tom Dixon, because people are constantly “assaulted” with what others are up to.
Dixon was a guest of honour at Toronto’s recent Interior Design Show, where his impressive Toronto Ice Kitchen installation kicked off a yearlong collaboration with quartz-surface pioneer Caesarstone.
“You need to have something that’s unexpected and different to succeed, otherwise you just repeat, and I think that’s what a lot of people find hard,” says Dixon.
Honing your own “personal standpoint” can be difficult, he says, particularly in design because it’s a “render culture” in which ideas are shared before they are realized.
Dixon says this isn’t helped by the general feeling these days that everything, be it fashion, music or products, is accepted as legitimate. There’s a blandness that results when everything is given a tick.
“There is a kind of lack of militancy,” says Dixon. “It all becomes vegetable soup. There’s no real subculture, nothing that I really hate and I should. I should be hating deep house or something, but I don’t. I quite like it. It’s OK.”
There is humour in these sentiments, of course. Not ideas flung out carelessly, but delivered with a half-smile and it’s this playfulness that people have come to love in his furniture and products.
The time Dixon spent as creative director for household furnishings company Habitat was better than the university education he never received, says Dixon, who was a well-known independent designer until he was recruited for the role in the late ’90s. This training helped him achieve global success with the Tom Dixon brand since launching in 2002.
“As a designer, what you have to be is obsessed with a single object,” he says. “Working in quite a narrow vision and as a creative director you have to be the opposite, you have to be open to everything and try to get many, many different people with different motivations to share a vision. So I jumped from being a small self-producing designer into what effectively was the biggest venture company in the world (Ikea owned Habitat). I was suddenly in charge of managing design rather than being a designer myself, so it taught me a lot about all kinds of things, not only about sourcing and manufacturing but also about communication, cataloguing, just general retail and how you sell things, what really sells and what people buy.”
Though Dixon’s brand is product-focused, it tackles “high-concept interiors” and “large-scale installations” through its Design Research Studio, with magnificent projects like Jamie Oliver’s restaurant Barbecoa, London’s Mondrian Hotel, the restaurant at the Royal Academy of Arts and Paris’s Eclectic Restaurant.
When Caesarstone approached Dixon about creating four semiprofessional kitchens each inspired by a different element (Ice, Fire, Earth and Air) that would come together at the Milan Furniture Fair, it appealed to him for a few reasons.
“I’m interested in cooking, just generally,” he says. “And I liked the idea of four separate installations that came together in Milan as a giant restaurant. I was interested in, ‘Can we make a kitchen that’s interesting enough and still works?’?
As leaders in designing and manufacturing quartz surfaces (for everything from countertops to flooring, walls and furniture) Caesarstone provided the perfect material for Dixon to achieve something beautiful and functional.
“Quartz is an engineered stone, so it has tremendous advantages in terms of the consistency of the look as well as its sheer beauty and, over time, a very low-cost option; very resistant to chipping, scratching and heat,” says Dan Clifford, president of Caesarstone Canada.
Over the last few years, Caesarstone has collaborated with designers like Nendo (in Japan), London-based Raw-Edges and Philippe Malouin to create those memorable “swings” that received a lot of attention at shows like the Interior Design Show and the Milan Furniture Fair.
“We’re developing a very credible reputation for thoughtful collaborations with the very best in the design world,” says Clifford.