The UK design company Australians love is ‘no longer a teenager’
Tom Dixon reflects on 20 years at the helm of his eponymous brand and why he has the best job for poking his nose in other people’s business
4 min
It might have been the jet lag talking, or perhaps it’s just evidence of his legendary laconic style but Tom Dixon’s view on the role of the designer is unorthodox, to say the least.
“Design is a great profession for the easily bored and the curious,” Tom Dixon commented.
Sitting down last week ahead of an event at Sydney’s Quay Quarter Tower created to celebrate 20 years of his company, Tom Dixon was reflecting on what could best be described as a meandering career.
Untrained, self taught and continually interested in the new possibilities of untried materials and their applications, Dixon’s career has been one of following his interests wherever they might take him, whether that is music, management – or design.
Indeed, while he was enjoying finally being able to see the foyer and market hall he designed for Quay Quarter Tower after three years of COVID stopped him from visiting Australia, he remained unconvinced the birthday celebrations were necessary.
“I don’t really think about these things and it was slightly imposed on me,” he said. “I like looking forward if at all possible.
“Maybe that’s why I didn’t really want to do it – 20 sounds quite old – like I’m no longer a teenager.”
He certainly continues to bring a youthful attitude to his work. The one-time bass guitarist for early 80s band, Funkapolitan who dropped out of the Chelsea School of Art, Dixon almost fell into design after becoming fascinated by the possibilities of welding.
This progressed into furniture design, with his S chair for Cappellini in 1989 (now in the New York Museum of Modern Art), followed by his appointment as creative director of Habitat, the epitome of homeware style in the 1990s, where he sharpened his understanding of the commercial realities of design and promoted emerging designers.
By the time the new century arrived, Dixon was ready to branch out on his own, founding his business, Tom Dixon in 2002. The Design Research Studio – the architectural and interior branch of his business – began the following year.
More than 20 years on and he is credited with some of the most ubiquitous designs, including his BEAT range of lighting, as well as some of the coolest interior spaces in Europe, including Shoreditch House in London and Le Drugstore in Paris. In recent years, he has experimented with sustainable materials such as cork, mushroom-based products and latex, although he remains frustrated that the cost of manufacturing makes them less appealing to a commercial market.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he prefers not to be categorised.
“The big battle always is stopping yourself from being categorised or pigeon holed because effectively, everything is designed,” he said. “What has been nice here is, doing a corporate lobby doesn’t seem like a nice job, really but getting to see it now, that is the kind of design challenge we haven’t really had before.
“It’s nice to approach it with a naive perspective.”
Clearly, that sense of exploration is key to what still drives him. Dixon’s range of homewares for residential and commercial use extends from lounge chairs and coffee tables to carafes, candles and cables. Such is his reach, the Tom Dixon brand sells in 90 countries.
So, what is it that has resonated with buyers from Beijing to Bondi?
“I don’t know if it does resonate across other cultures,” Dixon said. “Maybe I’m exotic. I sell in Dakar and I sell in Casablanca. Maybe I’m exotic because I’m not part of that culture.”
However, when products do well across the varied markets, Dixon said they tend to have something in common.
“When the objects we make are successful, they tend to be legible in different ways. I call it ‘expressive minimalism’,” he said.
“Minimalism can mean you work all the visibility of the functions out of an object just to make a cube or something you can’t really define as a toaster or a car. If you are able to express the functions, you’ll be able to put it in a lot of different contexts I think.
“And the most successful is where some people will say ‘oh that’s very Art Deco’ and others will say ‘that’s very Space Age’ and somebody else will say ‘that’s quite futuristic’.
“Those objects tend to be the successful ones.”
His lighting ranges, which mostly recently has included the ‘Melt’ range seen in Sydney’s Bennelong Restaurant and the perforated ‘Etch Puff’, continues his fascination with lighting. Dixon continues to be inspired, it seems, by this evolving sphere of design.
“It’s a category that is fascinating because it’s still in the middle of this huge revolution in technology – and you cannot say that about tables and chairs right now.
“You have to remember that 10 years ago, LEDs were an expensive and ugly light that nobody wanted.
“Lighting is still in the process of evolving. You can see it everywhere – the deconstructing of spaces with light. There is much more opportunity to be theatrical, much more opportunity to light things underneath or do washes or linear lighting.”
With so many options, the role of the lighting designer is even more important, he said.
“I was talking to Es Devlin,” Dixon said. “She’s the UK’s leading lighting designer for installations and rock shows. I asked her ‘what’s your tip for lighting’ and she said ‘turn it all off, have one candle’.”
It’s the notion of reducing complex problems into a simple, beautiful expression that comes through in Dixon’s work. Although, he has another take on the role of design.
“It’s a great profession for poking your nose into other people’s business.”
Tom Dixon’s collection is available in Australia through Living Edge.
From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
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