Marc Newson

Marc Newson (born 1963, Sydney, Australia) is an Australian designer known most notably for creating unique household goods, furniture, and interior spaces from unusual materials.

Newson attended the Sydney College of the Arts and graduated in 1984 with a degree in jewelry and sculpture. The following year he won a grant from the Crafts Board of the Australia Council, which enabled him to create his breakthrough piece, the aluminum and fibreglass Lockheed Lounge (1986). This was the first of several limited-edition chairs. Like many of his later furniture pieces, it is made of atypical materials. It has a seamless exterior and a Modernist yet somewhat retro form variously described as biomorphic or zoomorphic. In 1987 Newson moved to Japan, where he worked mostly with the design company Idée, creating among other objects the Charlotte chair (1987), the Super Guppy lamp (1987), the Embryo chair (1988), the three-legged carbon-fibre Black Hole table (1988), the Orgone lounge (1989), the Felt chair (1989), and the Wicker chair (1990).

In 1991 Newson moved to Paris, where he designed household products, first for Philippe Starck and later for Iittala in Finland and Alessi, Magis, and Flos in Italy. He formed a partnership with the Swiss businessman Oliver Ike to create Ikepod, a watch company, in 1994. Newson’s award-winning shapes and watch cases of gold, silver, and titanium—each signed and numbered—made his watches among the most exclusive pieces of jewelry in the world. (The company was relaunched in 2005, with different partners.) In 1997 Newson moved to London, where he began to design vehicles—among them the MN01 bicycle for Biomega (1999), the 021C concept car for Ford (1999), and the livery of a privately owned jet, the Falcon 900B (1999). In 2006 Newson was named creative director of Qantas Airways, for which he designed luxurious first-class lounges in the Melbourne and Sydney international airports. In Britain he was named (2006) Royal Designer for Industry.

In 2014 Newson left Qantas to join Apple Inc., where longtime friend Jony Ive was an executive. While there Newson notably worked on the Apple Watch. In 2019 both he and Ive left the computer company to found the design firm LoveFrom, though Apple was one of its clients.

Newson’s work was included in the collections of a number of major museums, among the most notable of which were the Design Museum in London; the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris; the Powerhouse Museum of Sydney; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Newson also had solo exhibitions at many other prestigious galleries and museums and across the globe.