Interview

BRANT: How often do you go back to Australia?

NEWSON: I go now three or four times a year. But, very ironically, it’s for professional reasons. My biggest client is the national airline.

BRANT: Yeah, Qantas. You are the creative director for them, aren’t you?

NEWSON: Yes. I design all the aircraft interiors—very slowly. But the one aircraft that I’ve done pretty much top-to-tail is the big A380. I’ve done bits of all of the other ones.

BRANT: Was the first thing you did for them the Skybed?

NEWSON: That’s absolutely correct, yeah. That was done about six or seven years ago. It was a business-class seat. Of course, that’s been upgraded now. We’re in a new generation, the latest of which is on the A380. The super-jumbo.

BRANT: You also designed the Pod Bar in Tokyo. That was an early interior for you, wasn’t it?

NEWSON: Yes, it was pretty much the first in a very tiny place. I’m not sure if it still exists. You know, the Japanese are so meticulous with their bars and the way they display their liquor. Doing anything in Japan as a sort of architecture-related project is just fantastic because they do everything so perfectly and so quickly. It’s unlike anywhere else in the world. Of course, we had a great budget for the Lever House in New York. I think we ended up doing a pretty good job. But if you compare that to Japan, it would have been done in a third of the time.

BRANT: So how did you get involved in doing a recording studio in Japan?

NEWSON: That was in the mid-’90s. When I first started traveling to Japan in the late ’80s, I became friends with an English guy by the name of Nick Woods. I guess he’s still my best friend. He moved to Tokyo at the same time I did. It’s actually funny—we were both dating models at the time and we were camping out in model apartments in Tokyo illegally. When the models’ bookers came in the morning to take them away, we’d be hiding in the cupboards. We subsequently broke up with our respective model girlfriends and ended up staying in town. Nick was a musician at the time—he still is, but has moved more into the role of producer. By the mid-’90s he had started doing incredibly well in Japan. He needed a recording studio, so he asked me to design it. It was a fun, low-budget job. Lots of international recording artists recorded there because this particular studio had a lot of personality.

BRANT: When you came back to Europe, you eventually forged a relationship with Didier and Clémence Krzentowski, who head Galerie Kreo. I’ve watched that develop and, to me, it was a design version of the Leo Castelli Gallery art system in the 1960s. Didier seemed to put together a great stable of designers. I’m sure you’re friends with all of them.

NEWSON: Absolutely. We were all good buddies even before we knew Didier. In fact, we were working with the same companies: Cappellini and all of the Italians. The typical rite of passage for a young designer is to go to Italy and work with those high-end companies—which actually aren’t that high end, you quickly discover. I think I was one of the first to work with Didier. I had already started producing a lot of aluminum furniture, like the Event Horizon table—that whole series of pieces . . . Didier asked, “Can I help you sell some of these pieces?” Because, of course, in those days, they simply weren’t selling. It was bizarre, you know. I designed an edition of 10 of these pieces, and I probably sold two or three of them at the time. The market hadn’t really caught on. And then when Didier started his gallery, he helped create awareness for that kind of stuff. And subsequently, he sold most of those pieces.

BRANT: When you first got out of art school, what artists really influenced you—besides the Italian futurists, of course?

NEWSON: When I was at art school, I was absolutely obsessed with people like Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp—that whole era of artists. In fact, the whole concept of the ready-made was something that I played with a little bit in my work. I made a light in Japan called Super Guppy Light, which was literally a street lamp stuck on the end of a pole. That was my ready-made, you know? More recently I drifted through different eras. I must say my favorite period would be Italian art in the 1950s, like Piero Manzoni. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that, even as a kid, I was very influenced by Italian design. What was happening in postwar Italy, including with automotive design, enormously inspired me.