One Designer To Watch

As design pervades our lives, will people toss industrial designers' names around with the same familiarity as they toss Calvin's, Ralph's or Donna's? Are we even heading into a world where Puffy Combs, having mastered music, clothes and side arms, would want to start his own housewares line? It's not implausible. A fast-moving, jack-of-all-trades breed of designer is emerging, chipping its way into the public consciousness by knocking out the walls between architectural, industrial, product and graphic design, turning out anything from a car to a dish drainer. And it needs no remedial lessons in self-promotion.

Philippe Starck is the most successful avatar of both the "from a spoon to a city" design phenomenon and the fame game. Consumers seek out products--or hotels or, in the case of the New York City restaurant 44, bathrooms--because they are designed by Starck. But younger renaissance types are beginning to follow. Foremost among them--and the designated designer to watch--is a 36-year-old London-based Australian named Marc Newson.

In the past two years, Newson has designed a concept car for Ford, house numbers, a bicycle, the interior of a business jet, chairs, drinking glasses and a restaurant in New York City, to name a few. He believes he could design anything. "People kind of tend to mystify design and architecture by suggesting you need to train," says Newson, who studied silversmithing at art school "because it was the one department which taught you how to build stuff." What he doesn't know he learns by designing. "Now that I've designed one car, I know enough how a car works to build another," he says.

Newson designed everything on the Ford 021C, from the tire treads to the knobs on the dashboard to the upholstery. "It was like 500 design projects at once," he says. And the tangerine-and-white car, with doors that swing different ways, a drawer for a trunk and an LED strip for headlights, was not like any other car at the auto show where it was introduced, or anywhere else. While the person who commissioned it, Ford's head designer J Mays, likes the car, he says he wouldn't have made it that way. Which, suggests Newson, was the point.

It's not just car companies calling on unlikely talent to catch the eye of consumer-overcultured buyers. Alessi had Newson design such banal things as a drain stopper, a toilet-roll holder and a bottle opener. Magis had him whip up a coat hanger and a tendriled dish drainer. "I'd love to be approached to do ordinary things more," says the designer. He's negotiating with Vidal Sassoon on a deal that would see him styling hair dryers and shampoo bottles.

A $60 dish drainer seems a long way from Newson's first design--a chaise longue made of hammered and riveted aluminum on fiber glass, which can now fetch more than $50,000. But the chaise longue's shape--an overweight hourglass--became the most basic utterance in Newson's vocabulary. He has thinned and thickened it over the years for chairs, soap dishes, doorstops, pepper grinders and bath pillows, but it's nearly always there.

One could argue, in fact, that Newson's designs are about little more than shape. He doesn't rethink what a stopper should do so much as apply his double-blob shape--he calls it the orgone--to the stopper or the project at hand. While this has worked remarkably well for objects, Newson's essays into architecture, as in the case of Canteen, a Manhattan restaurant, have fallen somewhat flat.

Newson's design shortcomings, however, probably won't block his inheritance of the popular mantle of Starck, given his mediagenic ways and eye for contemporary style. Exhibit A: the glossy coffee-table book of his works published this month that has an image of the designer himself, not one of his works, on the cover. Puffy, put Alessi on your speed dial.