Tom Dixon

Tom Dixon was born in Sfax in Tunisia in 1959. The son of a French-Latvian mother and an English father, he grew up in London in the UK. There, he studied at the Chelsea School of Art until 1978 and began his career as a designer in the early 1980s. At first, he built and welded furniture and objects together as "performance art" on stage at the London nightclub Titanic. In 1983, he began his first interior design projects, and in 1987 he opened his own workshop, Dixon PID, which later became known as Space.

In 1994, Tom Dixon founded Eurolounge to produce his own plastic products, such as the highly successful Jack light (1996), for which he received the Millennium Mark Award in 1997. Other well-known Dixon products include the Pylon Chair (1991) and S-Chair (1992) for Cappellini, the Hoop lounger for SCP (1998) and the Serpentine sofa system for Moroso (2003).

In 1998, Tom Dixon became art director of the home furnishings chain Habitat, where he also worked hard to support young designers. In 2002, he founded "Tom Dixon. The Company", where he has since developed product and interior design projects for clients as well as producing and selling his own furniture and home accessories.

Alongside Ron Arad and James Dyson, Tom Dixon is regarded as one of Britain's most important designers and was even honoured by the Queen with an OBE. Despite his rather avant-garde reputation, he takes a keen interest in rediscovering and reintroducing some of the great names of the 20th century, such as Robin Day.

"It's extraordinarily liberating to sell objects not because of their prestige value, but because they have the right price and the right design. We can do what designers like Robin Day originally wanted: produce great design for everyone."

For his self-taught skills and his versatility, Tom Dixon was named Maison&Objet Designer of the Year 2014 at the spring fair in Paris in France.