This year at London Design festival (LDF) Tom Dixon wants everyone to see the light. Each year he hosts an event for LDF at the Dock, his west London HQ, which is housed in a converted Victorian wharf building on the Grand Union canal, and this year's theme is luminosity. "It's a call to arms, a message to remember that lights aren't sculptures – they illuminate, and we need to illuminate people's perceptions," he says. "We talk about the light fittings, how they're made, what the influences are, but we've forgotten to talk about the light itself. It's a mysterious field full of technical appellations such as lumen and wattage… there's a lot of learning involved. I felt people might be interested."
The self-taught furniture designer served as Habitat's head of design and then creative director from 1998 to 2008. He is responsible for Italian brand Cappellini's famous S chair and his Jack lamp and Plump sofa have become icons of British design. If Dixon is interested in light, chances are the rest of us will be very soon. He's even excited by the legislation on lightbulbs: "Rules, scientific discoveries, they all change things… open it up for designers."
He's looking forward to LDF as a chance to open up the Dock to more visitors. The building houses his workshop, a restaurant, a tea shop (Tart, run by his elder daughter, Florence) and a shop full of beautiful, extend-the-overdraft furnishings. "I'm super-privileged to have a space like this in London so that I can invite a few pals from the Eurozone to show here during LDF," he says. "It's dozy and relaxed here most of the time, so it's good to get everybody tensed up and ready to perform."
LDF celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and Dixon feels that the past decade has been good for British design (though he could have done without the revival of baroque ornamentation and the re-emergence of Formica and patterned surfaces). But as the man who has spent his life creating objects of desire for others, is there anything he wished he owned himself? "I don't covet," he says. "I'm collecting heads at the moment – busts, many of them life-size, I have an attachment to them. I'd prefer a lovely building to a lovely object. I've got a water tower across the road. It's a folly, it had no purpose [it was decommissioned], which I liked. Also, I'm a typical boy: I'd really like a bridge."
