20 Minutes With: Lighting and Furniture Designer Tom Dixon

British designer Tom Dixon can’t be put into one box when it comes to product design. He is multi-talented, and widely recognised for his sci-fi lighting designs—many of which look like sculptures hanging from the ceiling—but that’s not where his talents end.

He also designs furniture, including lamps, chairs, and tables meant to brighten up drab interiors, often with a disco flair.

This year, Dixon celebrates 20 years of his namesake brand. Over the last two decades his brand has expanded to 90 countries, with showrooms in New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. The latest boutique opened in Beijing in 2020.

Dixon has won numerous awards, including the London Design Medal at the London Design Festival. In 2014, he received an Order of the British Empire from Her Majesty the Queen.

Dixon was born in 1959 in Sfax, Tunisia, as the son of an English teacher and a journalist for the BBC World Service. In 1972, he began studying art at Holland Park Comprehensive high school in London, specializing in pottery and life drawing, and in 1979, he began working creative odd jobs (one was painting at a cartoon film company, another was playing in a disco band called Funkapolitan).

The rise of punk in London at the time helped create space for the kind of freeform design ethos that Dixon adopted. It gave his generation “license to create—without certificates, university courses or parental approval,” he says. In 1983, he learned how to weld with the help of a friend who worked in an automotive shop. He made over 100 chairs by hand in his first year.

In 1986, Dixon designed the S-Chair, which became a hit with Italian manufacturers for its curvy, elegant design. “I have often been asked what the inspiration was behind the S-Chair, and, honestly, the only memory I have is of drawing a small doodle of a chicken and thinking that I could make a chair from it,” he laughs.

Today, Dixon’s studio is based in a 19th century factory called the Coal Office in King’s Cross. In June, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan this June.

From his second home on the south coast of England, Dixon, 63, spoke to Penta about his brand, fashion inspiration, and the future of sustainable design.

PENTA: Can you believe it has been 20 years?

Tom Dixon: I can’t believe it’s true. I’ve been doing this longer than 20 years, but it’s 20 years since this label. It’s ridiculous. When I started it, it was after working for Italian luxury companies, working in the corporate world at Habitat (which is the equivalent of Pottery Barn in the U.S.) as creative director, it was time for me to do my own thing again. I wanted to mimic how fashion designers operate—design but also take care of their distribution and communication, and they have their name over the door, too. As a rule, product designers typically work for other brands. I wanted to have a singular voice and hold my aesthetic ideas together under one roof.

What fashion designers have you looked up to?

I love the Japanese brands that came out of the 1980s, like Commes des Garcons and Issey Miyake, in terms of keeping a sense of integrity. I love Raf Simons’ own label, too. There are young English designers at the moment too, like Grace Wales Bonner.

Who are your design heroes?

I was fortunate to have met the living design legends of the 1950s and 1960s before they passed away. Designers like Ettore Sottsass, Achille Castiglioni, Verner Panton, and Enzo Mari, who for me really are amazing examples who really believed in design as a way of changing the world. It was postwar Europe. When I first started, I was mainly interested in sculpture and only learned about design after I fell into it.

What was Ettore Sottsass from the Memphis Group like?

Calm, friendly, and unassuming. He was great. There were also designers I was inspired to rebel against. I thought postmodernism was the ugliest thing, very pastel, geometric and patterned. Meanwhile I was making things out of rusty metal. I’ve grown to love the Memphis Group—Ettore was not only a prolific designer, but he organized a whole movement. He has that polymath attitude, like Buckminster Fuller or Isamu Noguchi.

What was your approach for The Manzoni (restaurant and showroom) in Milan? It’s like a concrete metal jungle with an abundance of lights.

It was an attempt to try to challenge the idea of having conventional showrooms. I’ve been interested in food for a long time, there’s a link between entertaining and design, in general. We managed to get our restaurant The Coal Office going well in King’s Cross, so we brought something to Italy.

My time in Italy was often tied around food, as meetings with manufacturers were based around lunchtime at their factory, many of which have canteens. I thought it would be better to spend the money on a restaurant with a small showroom attached. Rather than someone entering a design showroom every 20 years to buy a designer table, they might come every two weeks to have lunch and eat off our plates and drink from our glasses. It’s a way to engage people than to have a dusty old furniture store.

What’s next for you?

My core interest remains the same. I love manufacturing techniques, materials, whether it’s industry or craft, we have a close relationship with the people who make the pieces. We have to be conscious and aware of our impact on the planet.

There are a few experiments in thinking through what sustainability looks like for a furniture company and how we can be more thoughtful about what we put into the world. That’s what our future is rotating around. We have to constantly rethink what we’ve done and how to pave the way for the future.

What is your approach to sustainable design?

Sustainability isn’t a single thing, it’s a huge host of actions. The most sustainable thing would be not to make anything at all. There’s a seaside plant called eel grass, which is collected in Denmark to create roofing material, and we’re experimenting with it as an upholstery material. Like many other people, we’re experimenting with mycelium, a type of fungi to make furniture. We’re also doing a conceptual project where we’re growing chairs underwater.

In Singapore, it’s not unusual for total strangers to ask, “Have you eaten yet?” A greeting akin to “Good morning,” it invariably leads to follow-up questions. What did you eat? Where did you eat it? Was it good? Greeters reserve the right to judge your responses and offer advice, solicited or otherwise, on where you should eat next.

Locals will often joke that gastronomic opinions can make (and break) relationships and that eating is a national pastime. And why wouldn’t it be? In a nexus of colliding cultures—a place where Malays, Indians, Chinese and Europeans have brushed shoulders and shared meals for centuries—the mix of flavours coming out of kitchens in this country is enough to make you believe in world peace.

While Michelin stars spangle Singapore’s restaurant scene , to truly understand the city’s relationship with food, you have to venture to the hawker centres. A core aspect of daily life, hawker centres sprang up in numbers during the 1970s, built by authorities looking to sanitise and formalise the city’s street-food scene. Today, 121 government-run hawker centres feature food stalls that specialise in dishes from the country’s various ethnic groups. In one of the world’s most expensive cities, hawker dishes are shockingly cheap: A full meal can cost as little as $3.

Over the course of many visits to Singapore, I’ve fallen in love with these places—and with the scavenger hunts to find meals I’ll never forget: delicate bowls of laksa noodle soup, where brisk lashes of heat interrupt addictive swirls of umami; impossibly flaky roti prata dipped in curry; the beautiful simplicity of an immaculately roasted duck leg. In a futuristic and at times sterile city, hawker centres throw back to the past and offer a rare glimpse of something human in scale. To an outsider like me, sitting at a table amid the din of the lunch-hour rush can feel like glimpsing the city’s soul through all the concrete and glitz.

So I’ve been alarmed in recent years to hear about the supposed demise of hawker centres. Would-be hawkers have to bid for stalls from the government, and rents are climbing . An upwardly mobile generation doesn’t want to take over from their parents. On a recent trip to Singapore, I enlisted my brother, who lives there, and as we ate our way across the city, we searched for signs of life—and hopefully a peek into what the future holds.

At Amoy Street Food Centre, near the central business district, 32-year-old Kai Jin Thng has done the math. To turn a profit at his stall, Jin’s Noodle , he says, he has to churn out at least 150 $4 bowls of kolo mee , a Malaysian dish featuring savoury pork over a bed of springy noodles, in 120 minutes of lunch service. With his sister as sous-chef, he slings the bowls with frenetic focus.

Thng dropped out of school as a teenager to work in his father’s stall selling wonton mee , a staple noodle dish, and is quick to say no when I ask if he wants his daughter to take over the stall one day.

“The tradition is fading and I believe that in the next 10 or 15 years, it’s only going to get worse,” Thng said. “The new generation prefers to put on their tie and their white collar—nobody really wants to get their hands dirty.”

In 2020, the National Environment Agency , which oversees hawker centres, put the median age of hawkers at 60. When I did encounter younger people like Thng in the trade, I found they persevered out of stubbornness, a desire to innovate on a deep-seated tradition—or some combination of both.

Later that afternoon, looking for a momentary reprieve from Singapore’s crushing humidity, we ducked into Market Street Hawker Centre and bought juice made from fresh calamansi, a small citrus fruit.

Jamilah Beevi, 29, was working the shop with her father, who, at 64, has been a hawker since he was 12. “I originally stepped in out of filial duty,” she said. “But I find it to be really fulfilling work…I see it as a generational shop, so I don’t want to let that die.” When I asked her father when he’d retire, he confidently said he’d hang up his apron next year. “He’s been saying that for many years,” Beevi said, laughing.

More than one Singaporean told me that to truly appreciate what’s at stake in the hawker tradition’s threatened collapse, I’d need to leave the neighbourhoods where most tourists spend their time, and venture to the Heartland, the residential communities outside the central business district. There, hawker centres, often combined with markets, are strategically located near dense housing developments, where they cater to the 77% of Singaporeans who live in government-subsidised apartments.

We ate laksa from a stall at Ghim Moh Market and Food Centre, where families enjoyed their Sunday. At Redhill Food Centre, a similar chorus of chattering voices and clattering cutlery filled the space, as diners lined up for prawn noodles and chicken rice. Near our table, a couple hungrily unwrapped a package of durian, a coveted fruit banned from public transportation and some hotels for its strong aroma. It all seemed like business as usual.

Then we went to Blackgoat . Tucked in a corner of the Jalan Batu housing development, Blackgoat doesn’t look like an average hawker operation. An unusually large staff of six swirled around a stall where Fikri Amin Bin Rohaimi, 24, presided over a fiery grill and a seriously ambitious menu. A veteran of the three-Michelin-star Zén , Rohaimi started selling burgers from his apartment kitchen in 2019, before opening a hawker stall last year. We ordered everything on the menu and enjoyed a feast that would astound had it come out of a fully equipped restaurant kitchen; that it was all made in a 130-square-foot space seemed miraculous.

Mussels swam in a mushroom broth, spiked with Thai basil and chives. Huge, tender tiger prawns were grilled to perfection and smothered in toasted garlic and olive oil. Lamb was coated in a whisper of Sichuan peppercorns; Wagyu beef, in a homemade makrut-lime sauce. Then Ethel Yam, Blackgoat’s pastry chef prepared a date pudding with a mushroom semifreddo and a panna cotta drizzled in chamomile syrup. A group of elderly residents from the nearby towers watched, while sipping tiny glasses of Tiger beer.

Since opening his stall, Rohaimi told me, he’s seen his food referred to as “restaurant-level hawker food,” a categorisation he rejects, feeling it discounts what’s possible at a hawker centre. “If you eat hawker food, you know that it can often be much better than anything at a restaurant.”

He wants to open a restaurant eventually—or, leveraging his in-progress biomedical engineering degree, a food lab. But he sees the modern hawker centre not just as a steppingstone, but a place to experiment. “Because you only have to manage so many things, unlike at a restaurant, a hawker stall right now gives us a kind of limitlessness to try new things,” he said.

Using high-grade Australian beef and employing a whole staff, Rohaimi must charge more than typical hawker stalls, though his food, around $12 per 100 grams of steak, still costs far less than high-end restaurant fare. He’s found that people will pay for quality, he says, even if he first has to convince them to try the food.

At Yishun Park Hawker Centre (now temporarily closed for renovations), Nurl Asyraffie, 33, has encountered a similar dynamic since he started Kerabu by Arang , a stall specialising in “modern Malay food.” The day we came, he was selling ayam percik , a grilled chicken leg smothered in a bewitching turmeric-based marinade. As we ate, a hawker from another stall came over to inquire how much we’d paid. When we said around $10 a plate, she looked skeptical: “At least it’s a lot of food.”

Asyraffie, who opened the stall after a spell in private dining and at big-name restaurants in the region, says he’s used to dubious reactions. “I think the way you get people’s trust is you need to deliver,” he said. “Singapore is a melting pot; we’re used to trying new things, and we will pay for food we think is worth it.” He says a lot of the same older “uncles” who gawked at his prices, are now regulars. “New hawkers like me can fill a gap in the market, slightly higher than your chicken rice, but lower than a restaurant.”

But economics is only half the battle for a new generation of hawkers, says Seng Wun Song, a 64-year-old, semiretired economist who delves into the inner workings of Singapore’s food-and-beverage industry as a hobby. He thinks locals and tourists who come to hawker centers to look for “authentic” Singaporean food need to rethink what that amorphous catchall word really means. What people consider “heritage food,” he explains, is a mix of Malay, Chinese, Indian and European dishes that emerged from the country’s founding. “But Singapore is a trading hub where people come and go, and heritage moves and changes. Hawker food isn’t dying; it’s evolving so that it doesn’t die.”

20 Minutes With: Lighting and Furniture Designer Tom Dixon

No trip to Singapore is complete without a meal (or 12) at its hawker centres, where stalls sell multicultural dishes from generations-old recipes. But rising costs and demographic change are threatening the beloved tradition.