A house we carry
Tom Dixon taught himself to weld. Born in Tunisia in 1959 and in England from 1963, he dropped out of Chelsea School of Art, played bass in Funkapolitan, then started making furniture from salvaged metal in the 1980s. His S-Chair of 1991, produced by Cappellini, is in the MoMA collection.
He took charge of design at Habitat in 1998, went on to serve as its creative director until 2008, and launched his own brand in London in the early 2000s. Unlike most of the houses in this catalogue, it commissions no outside designers: the company draws, produces and sells under its own name alone.
The craft lies in metal treated by methods rare in decorative lighting. Vacuum metallisation, developed on the Mirror Ball in 2003, produced the Copper Shade in 2005, the mirrored copper hemisphere that became the brand's image. The Beat collection borrows the hand-beaten metalwork of Indian food vessels, gold inside, white or black outside. Melt is mouth-blown, with its look of glass caught mid-collapse.
The headquarters, called the Coal Office, has occupied 1851 coal buildings at King's Cross since 2018, with studio, shop, workshop and restaurant under one roof. Artopia carries Tom Dixon in Geneva.