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.
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In a series of social-media posts, the eldest child of David and Victoria Beckham threw stones at the image of a ‘perfect family’.
3 min
David Beckham was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday with Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan to promote their new partnership. But all anyone wanted to talk about was his son.
After the obligatory questions about business and the World Cup, a host on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” lobbed Beckham an out-of-left-field query about how young people can preserve their mental health in the age of social media.
“Children are allowed to make mistakes,” Beckham, 50, said. “That’s how they learn. So, that’s what I try to teach my kids, but you have to sometimes let them make those mistakes as well.”
Just a day earlier, his 26-year-old son Brooklyn Beckham had posted a series of accusations about his soccer-famous father and pop-star-turned-fashion-designer mother, Victoria Beckham.
He said that his parents had controlled him for years, lied about him to the press and sought to damage his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham. Their goal, he said, was to affect the image of a “perfect family.”
“My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote on Instagram. “Brand Beckham comes first.”
That brand has been burnished over decades of professional triumphs, tabloid scandals and slick dealmaking.
Recently, both David and Victoria Beckham put their legacies on-screen in docuseries that cast them as hardworking entrepreneurs and devoted parents. Their image appeared stronger than ever. Now their firstborn child is throwing stones.
Representatives for David Beckham, Victoria Beckham and Brooklyn Beckham did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Nicola Peltz Beckham declined to comment.
In the U.K., the Beckhams are as close as you can get to royalty without sharing Windsor DNA. David is perhaps the most famous English player in soccer history, while Victoria parlayed her Spice Girls fame into a career as a respected fashion designer.
Their partnership was forged in the cauldron of 1990s celebrity gossip, with their every move—in their careers, their bumpy personal lives and their adventurous senses of personal style—subject to tabloid scrutiny.
“They were Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce,” said Elaine Lui, founder of the website Lainey Gossip.
Over time, the couple became savvy managers of their own brand, a sprawling modern empire including a professional soccer team, fashion and beauty lines, investment deals and commercial partnerships.
In recent years they each released a Netflix docuseries—“Beckham” in 2023, “Victoria Beckham” in 2025—featuring scenes from their private family life. (Brooklyn and Nicola appeared in David’s series, but not Victoria’s.)
“The way they’ve performed their celebrity has been togetherness,” Lui said: Appearing and engaging with the world as a happily married couple, in both relative calm and amid scandal. And as their family grew, their four children became smiling ambassadors for Brand Beckham, too.
Until Monday night. In a series of Instagram Story posts, Brooklyn accused his parents of “trying endlessly to ruin” his marriage to Nicola, an actress and model, and the daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz . Brooklyn declared, “I do not want to reconcile with my family.”
Where Victoria and David seemed to see press scrutiny as part of the job, Brooklyn and Nicola are operating in a manner more typical of their own generation. Brooklyn’s posts call to mind the “no contact” boundaries some children have enforced with their parents in recent years to much pop-psych chatter.
Andrew Friedman, managing director of crisis communications at Orchestra, said he’d advised many clients through family drama. “Going public,” he said, should be a “last resort.”
He’s also warned clients that using social media to air grievances opens a can of worms. “Nuance is not welcome in social-media feeding frenzies,” Friedman said. “Sensational and unusual details will overshadow the central issue.”
Brooklyn, the eldest of the Beckhams’ four children, has built a following in his parents’ image, though without the benefit (or burden) of a steady career.
He’s worked as a model, photographer, cooking-show host and most recently founded a hot-sauce brand. Brooklyn and Nicola went public with their relationship in 2020 and married in a lavish 2022 ceremony at her family estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
Rumors of a family feud flared almost immediately after the wedding, including whispers about the fact that Nicola didn’t wear a dress made by her fashion-designer mother-in-law.
Brooklyn on Monday recounted further grievances related to a mother-son dance and the seating chart. In the months and years that followed, celebrity journalists and fans closely tracked both generations of the family, looking for cracks in the relationship.
But official dispatches from Beckham World suggested that things were just fine. In a scene from the final episode of David’s Netflix series, the Beckham family, including Brooklyn and Nicola, joke around on a visit to their country home. It’s a picture of familial bliss.
“We’ve tried to give our children the most normal upbringing as possible. But you’ve got a dad that was England captain and a mom that was Posh Spice,” David says in voice-over.
“And they could be little s—s. And they’re not. And that’s why I say I’m so proud of my children, and I’m so in awe of my children, the way they’ve turned out.”
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