Marc Newson

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.

0:30So don't wait. Get yours today. Visit buyatoyota.com. For deals and more, Toyota, let's go places. Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? Wash away your worries with Anabay. Anabay is the only machine washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices. That's right. Sofas start at just$699. Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slipcovers made with performance fabric. Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing. The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime.

1:12Shop washablesofas.com for early Black Friday savings, up to 60 % off site-wide, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund. No return shipping or restocking fees. Every penny back. Upgrade now at washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. You're listening to Ruthie's Table 4 in collaboration with me and Em, intelligent style for busy women. Not long ago, I adventured to the Cotswolds to spend the day with Mark Newsom at his home. I thought I knew Mark well, but entering his house and his world, seeing what he'd created, elegant, warm spaces, incredible attention to detail.

2:03The design of a light switch, a door handle, a sofa, a bed, or a bath gave me a deeper insight into this remarkable person. Mark is the industrial designer of our time. The Lockheed lounge chair on just 25, the embryo, the Qantas skybed, the O21C concept car for Ford, and of course, the Apple Watch. Today on table four, Mark is in my home, the River Cafe, where we'll share stories about food and family and design another adventure with an amazing man. Did we have Thai food? Was it a Thai South that we had? I think we had Thai food, or sort of an attempt at Thai food that day. Yeah, it's really good.

2:42Good, good. Well, you lived in Japan. My family lived in Japan, actually, when I was a kid growing up. And I lived in South Korea as well. So I spent a big chunk of my childhood traveling and living in the Far East, I guess you'd call it. So born in? In Sydney. In Sydney. In Australia. Tell me about that. Well, we lived in a multi-generational household with my grandparents. I mean, my mom was in her, I guess, early 20s at that point, but working during the days. So I'd come home just... What did she do? Do you know? She did a variety of different sorts of jobs, you know, mostly sort of secretarial kind of stuff, I suppose.

3:21But the point was that she worked. And, you know, so I'd come home from school, go straight to my grandparents' house and spend, you know, an enormous amount of time with them growing up with my grandfather and my grandmother. My grandfather, who was an immigrant from Greece. Was he first generation in Australia or was there his parents? He was born in Greece and came by himself. I think he left Greece when he was about 14 years old, as they did back in those days. I mean, that must have been 1920 or something like that he came to Australia. But he was, you know, a big influence on my life. They were incredible, incredible times.

3:57And interestingly, you know, the one memory that stays with me to this day was my, you know, my grandfather had, there were two spaces in this sort of household that were sort of his spaces. One was the garage stroke workshop. The other was the kitchen. Oh, really? My grandfather did all the cooking. Your grandfather did? Yeah. My grandmother wasn't really allowed in the kitchen. But she was Australian? She was Australian of English sort of Scottish descent. But she literally, you know, she barely went into the kitchen only occasionally to make tea and toast. So he would work all day, come back, cook.

4:33What did he do? What was his job? He had a variety of jobs through his career. I mean, he owned shops in Sydney, everything from what they called milk bars, which were sort of cafes, really. That was sort of the local name for a cafe, which were all run by Greeks, Greek immigrants. He owned a barber shop, but he wasn't a barber. And he ended up later in life becoming a gardener. And that was, you know, what he did, you know, for the last 20 years of his life. He was a brilliant, you know, fantastic gardener. Did he cook Greek food? I remember it as being mostly Greek in sort of origin. You know, all of the sort of staple.

5:14Tell me about Greek food. What is Greek food? Well, that's a really great question. I mean, yeah. When I think of Greek food, I think of things like taramasalata. You know, it's more the kind of the small things. They've got a meze, tzatziki, something called skodalia, which is basically like garlicky mashed potato. I mean, it's like it literally looks like mashed potato. It's not the one in the triangular pastry? No, no, no. It looks like, it looks like pomme puree. It looks like sort of mashed potato. How do you eat that? Do you eat that with some? You often have that with cod, with, with, I think it's, sometimes it's, it's sort of fried cod, but sometimes it's also steamed cod.

5:50And it's a really particular, particular recipe. But, but it's, it's, it's literally liquefied garlic. I mean, it's, this stuff. It's like so strong. So they're, they're the sorts of things that, that I remember kind of growing up, you know, growing up with. Of course, you know, my half of the family, well, most of the family, I guess, were sort of Anglo-Saxon, right? So everything that he cooked was sort of, you know, sort of watered down Greek. But there was a huge Greek community in Sydney, in Australia. So, you know, you know, Greek food was something that was not common, but it wasn't uncommon.

6:27You know, in this world we're in right now of, you know, the fear of immigration, you realize the wealth that immigrants bring to a country. Yeah, absolutely. So what would Australia be without the Greek and without Greek food? Well, the Greeks, the Italians, the Lebanese. The Mediterranean culture, in fact, is – and that's why I suppose after that, maybe even decades after that, Sydney became a bit of a kind of a food place. Food place, yeah. Yeah, and it's for that reason. His parents stayed in Greece. Oh, they stayed? Yeah. With who? He came by himself, yeah. 14. Maybe even 13. That's what happened back then.

7:05He was the oldest of, I think, eight or maybe even nine children. And he was sent off to the new world. He first went to South Africa, which was the route. I mean, there were all these sorts of shipping routes. And the Greeks were big sort of merchant marines. And that was what they did. and he went to stay with relatives who had already established themselves in South Africa. And, you know, he never, he came back to Greece once for the rest of his life. In his whole life. In his whole life. So I guess, you know, he never saw his father ever again. But eventually he brought his mother out to Australia, but she was by that point, you know, quite old.

7:49What was the promise of that? But I think there had been precedence, you know. So my grandfather's father had already been to Australia at the end of the 19th century. There was a gold rush. Yeah. You know, so he'd gone to Australia during a gold rush, made a fortune, come back to Greece. So people had already been traveling, you know, to these faraway places for, you know, a generation or two before that. So it was far away and it took a long time to get there. but it was known that those trips took years, not weeks. You know, the island that my grandfather came from is called Ithaca. And almost all of the people emigrated, or everybody had someone from their family that emigrated.

8:35And they went to one of three places. It was either South Africa, Australia, or the U.S., to New York specifically. I guess maybe that's why there's an Ithaca in New York. I'm not quite sure. Yeah, not far from where I live. Oh, really? I'm from upstate New York. Ithaca, that's where Cornell is. Oh, yeah, right. And Richard taught. It's hysterical going back. I go to Ithaca. I know, you have a house there. Yeah, we have a house there. And at certain times of the year, you'll only hear American, South African or Australian accents. Because they're all coming back. All of these families have kind of come back, you know, coming back to visit or they're, you know, they've inherited a bit of family property or something like that.

9:09It's really, really funny. You know, I get my sort of, you know, my annual dose of Australia. Yeah, because in Ithaca. In Ithaca, not in Australia. Yeah. Tell me about growing up then. You'd come home from school and... My mum was so young. She was out working. I'd come home from school because she wouldn't get home from work until sort of 6 or even 7 p.m. And we'd all eat together. Me, my mum, my mother's brother, my uncle, my grandfather and grandmother. So it was the five of us. And we'd have, you know, kind of a family meal in the evening. And he would cook. He would do everything. I mean, he was sort of slightly obsessed with the notion that if you wanted to do something properly, you have to do it yourself.

9:50Do it yourself, yeah. And I'm afraid I'm sort of afflicted with... Are you kind of like that? Yeah, yeah, sadly. Well, nice for all of us that you can do that. I'm a bit of a control freak. It sounds really warm and nice. It was. It was fantastic. Can I ask you about your father? Did you ever see... So my father left... Was he as young as your mom? Yeah, I think maybe a few months older or maybe a year, but he wasn't really on the scene. I didn't meet my father until about 10 years ago, actually. So he'd completely sort of disappeared when I was, you know, not long after I was born. So he wasn't present at all, you know, in that period of time.

10:27But I guess, you know, my family was that extended family, really. You know, it was all of those people. It was, you know, it was grandparents and uncle and mother. And, you know, I didn't feel that I sort of wanted for a father figure as such. There were plenty of men around, like my grandfather and uncle, that were showing me what to do. But I was always really independent anyway. I'd go off and sort of make things. I was obsessed with making things. Yeah, making. You said that in the garage you had a workshop. What was that? Yeah. The garage was really a place to fix things, to kind of a DIY space with tools and stuff.

11:01I mean, bits of wood and tools. And it was a place where I spent almost all of my time, you know, making things, learning how to sort of build things by myself. So you knew at quite an early age that you wanted to make things. Absolutely. You know, for me, making things was always a means to an end, though. You know, if I wanted to have something, then I kind of had to make it. You know, Australia was, and maybe still is, I'm not sure, a sort of a DIY culture. And maybe that was everywhere, actually. I remember the repair shop. I remember my parents used to take things to be fixed. It's interesting in my day job now, you know, the notion that you can get something repaired is a form of luxury now.

11:43You know, something that's not disposable, you know, something that doesn't end up on a pile of landfill. You can take it back to Louis Vuitton and get it repaired. But it's great. You should be able to repair things. When you design, do you think about the fact that it may have to be repaired or do you think that this will be? Oh, no, no. You think a lot about that. Absolutely. Yeah, I embrace the idea. Yeah. You know, we build things, you know, we design things. with the idea that they could be fixed. I do a lot of work. I'm designing watches and timepieces and things like that. They not only need to be fixed, but they need to be serviced in order to function properly.

12:17And it's a notion that now, especially younger generations of people, you don't think that you've got to get things oiled and greased and serviced, basically. I mean, as a designer, for me, one of the greatest, you know, attributes that a product can have is that, you know, you can buy it once and have it forever. Yeah. You know, I love the idea that you buy a pen, you know, your favorite pen. And that'll be the pen, unless you lose it, of course. That's my problem. Which is my problem, too. Can we solve that one? Maybe that would be a good thing. Like the repair shop. We could get the find it shop.

12:55Yeah, we need to put. Finding things. It's just like. Yeah, Apple need to make a much smaller air tag for all of these things. Yeah, those things, yeah, I know. And people as well. Where is that friend I had? Yeah, where's that child? Where's that child? Where's that daughter? Where's that daughter? Yeah, where is that daughter? Okay, so going back to this growing up in Australia. Yeah, it was quite traditional. Mundane is maybe too strong a word, but it felt reasonably sort of run of the mill. But when I was about seven or eight, I can't remember, my mother got a job. She was working in an architect's office, actually.

13:28And these architects built, created, I guess, what ended up becoming one of the very first sort of boutique hotels maybe in the Southern Hemisphere. We're talking kind of late 60s, early 70s. And it was in a place called Cairns, which is like the far, far north of Australia, completely tropical, by the way. I mean, it's like in the middle of nowhere. And they created this sort of little boutique hotel and they sent my mum and obviously me to go and run this little boutique hotel. We drove up in a combi van, a VW combi van with our dog. And it was so cool. A lot of the furniture was designed by Joe Colombo.

14:09I mean, it was incredibly cool, this place, in the middle of nowhere. You know, celebrities like Britt Eklund would come and stay and Lee Marvin, I can remember. Wow, Lee Marvin. Yeah. And they engaged a French chef who came out with her husband, Jules. Her name was Georgette. she came from France to live there. And she was kind of a hippie. But that was my first exposure to sort of anything other than sort of sort of like French haute cuisine. Yeah, do you remember it? Absolutely. I remember that and I remember her chain-smoking gall was. Yeah. No, but then that was a sort of... How long were you there for?

14:44I think we were there for about 18 months. It felt like a lifetime, but it was a relatively short period of time. And you went to school there? Yeah, I went to school in the middle of a cane field on the back of a Bedford. You know, the school bus was a Bedford lorry. Sounds like the Wild West. Yeah, it was bonkers.

15:12Life gets messy. Spills, stains, and kid chaos. But with Anive, cleaning up is easy. Our sofas are fully machine washable, inside and out, so you never have to stress about messes again. Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics, that means fewer stains and more peace of mind. Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly. Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes. Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last. That's why over 200 ,000 happy customers have made the switch.

15:54Get early access to Black Friday pricing right now. Sofas start at just$699. Visit washablesofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Did you also make a watch? Yeah, I modified a watch. I didn't touch the insides, so I was given a watch, actually. Maybe it was my first watch, just not long after I'd learned how to tell the time, because, you know, as you will remember, that was a little bit of a rite of passage. Big hand on the... Yeah, learning how to tell the time. Yeah. I think I must have been about eight or nine years old or something like that.

16:35The first thing I did was take it into the garage and pull it to pieces and sort of rehouse it, a newly designed case which I made. There was a sheet of blue plexiglass, which I guess was maybe a quarter of an inch thick, So I cut out sort of a rectangular shape, cut a similarly shaped rectangle for the back and one for the front, and sort of sandwiched it together, right? So it was sort of clear on the top and clear on the bottom, and the movement just sort of sat in the middle. I'm not even sure if I got as far as attaching a watch band to it. Yeah, I was going to ask you about the strap. Before I sort of started to lose interest.

17:06So it was transparent. It was, it was, yeah, yeah, yeah. At that young, your first thing you did showed how something could work. Yeah, well, you know, you can see the movement from the back and the front. And I screwed the whole thing together with these little brass screws that I found. In the workshop or somewhere? In the workshop, yeah, everything was there. So it was an exercise in working with found objects, you know, with DIY, what was available at the time. And I can remember everybody in my family was sort of, you know, simultaneously horrified and thrilled. you know horrified that i pulled this thing to pieces and and but thrilled that you did that's good that you're in a family that was thrilled thrilled and relieved that i'd sort of managed to repurpose it maybe that was the first thing that i ever designed actually what i can remember exactly did your family go out i mean you paint the picture of a very kind of internal life of the workshop the kitchen the food the family but did you did you go to restaurants in my younger years i can't really ever remember going to restaurants we must have at some point but but i don't think you know at that time in sydney we're talking kind of late 60s 70s restaurant culture wasn't wasn't like it is now i mean you know sydney today i mean that's all people do is talk about restaurants and real estate yeah i mean that's their sort of obsession when did that happened to you that you started eating out well so so when we we um we came back from uh from cairns my mother and i and i went to you know primary school for a few more years and my mother got remarried when when i was was about 12 years old or 13 and my stepfather got um had immediately got transferred to go and live in south korea he was working for this big american pharmaceutical company so so then then well that's a big deal crazy so i went to live in south korea age what age age like 12 but i went there and i went for three years and that was when i can remember going to restaurants for the first time south korea well yeah because we we we first had to stay in a hotel for until because there was nowhere the house that we were going to live in wasn't ready so we stayed in a hotel which you know was the kind of the most luxurious hotel in soul at the time bearing in mind that south korea in the 70s was it was a military dictatorship right there was a curfew from 11 p.m till sort of 6 a.m you couldn't go out i mean it was a proper kind of military huge american military presence there um we live very close to the american army base actually nevertheless you know we there were restaurants and there were places to go out um and and that's when i started you know getting a taste for for for restaurants but south korean food it It was Korean food.

19:49Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's no international food. No, no, no. I mean, it was incredibly... What did you eat? Things like bulgogi, right? Kimchi, of course. Everybody had kimchi. I wasn't so fond of kimchi, although I love it now. Kimpop, you know, or basically like sort of rolls with seaweed. You know, it was like really typical Korean. And we had a Korean made. Korean is a really big deal now. Do you ever have it here? I don't, but I should. Well, let's maybe you and I get to go and find some place, shall we? Yeah, I mean, good Korean. I mean, like kind of, you know... It is. Korean culture is crazy.

20:21No, in New York, it's all about Korea, about the Korean barbecue, about the way the Korean food. But my exposure to sort of cuisine was mostly being taken onto the American Army base by my friends from school, sneaking onto the American Army base and sneaking into the PX. They had these shops called PXs where you could buy everything American. It was the first time I ever came across Dr. Pepper and Red Licorice. and that was pretty exciting. I had a friend who was in Germany as well who said the same thing. You'd go to the base and it was like being in a supermarket in Ithaca, New York. It was very funny.

20:59So you lived in Korea and then went back to... I got sent back to Australia to boarding school in Sydney. But I'd go and visit them practically every holiday. So maybe two, three times a year I'd go off to see them in Tokyo. Then I really got sort of bitten by the travel bug. That was explosion. That was it. Tokyo became my place. That was what age? I was probably 16 or 17 at that point. And that also must have been design-wise quite impressive for you. Yeah, it was. What struck me about being in Japan, being anywhere actually outside of Australia, was just culturally the way that different people solve problems.

21:40They solve problems in different ways. So, for example, you'd go into the subway in Tokyo and you'd sort of observe how things were built and what materials they'd used. All of the railings were stainless steel. It was the first time I'd ever seen that. And I can remember the same thing in Paris. I lived in Paris for quite a while when I was older and getting on a metro that was on rubber tires. Yeah, the silence of the... Yeah, which is just kind of a mad concept. But the way that different cultures solve problems in different ways, that was the thing that really struck me about being in Japan because it really was about as far away as you could you know culturally it was extremely different you know everybody associates Japan with with detail kind of minimalism yeah minimalism resolving things and uh you know for me uh the mentality that I had I felt right at home there you know it felt like the country I should have been born in you know the way that they sort of thought about things not so much that they thought uh you know that everything was about detail it was more that that it felt to me like they were thinking on on a smaller scale they just they just considered things you know on a much much smaller scale and it was it felt you know that was kind of how i thought about things food wise i always think that you know people who say if you opened a restaurant somewhere else you know new york or san francisco or miami or dubai you know and how would you actually control it and funny enough I think Tokyo could do it you know because I always had this idea that you could get Japanese cooks to come in here chefs to work here for a certain period of time and they'd probably end up making fresh tagularini better than we did I mean I don't you know you don't want to generalize about a culture but there seemed to be an attention to that detail if you do it becomes so fancy but upset you know I mean you really you can't eat badly I mean you really struggle to eat about it.

23:31Tell me about Japanese food. What do you feel? It feels to me like Italy, right? There are these two cultures that you, you know, food is just so important and the quality of food. It's all about the quality, isn't it? The quality of the produce and the execution. But it's, as soon as I. Oh yeah, so we're going back. You were sent back to boarding school. Yeah. And then you went to college, to design school. I went to art school actually. In Sydney. In Sydney, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I never studied design formally. I decided I wanted to become a jeweler and a silversmith, mostly because that was the only part of the art school where you could actually learn how to do something.

24:08You know, if you're in the art department, you know, the painting department or the sculpture department, they'd sort of leave you to your own devices and you just kind of get on with it. But in the jewelry department, the silversmithing department, they teach you how to actually do things with metal. So I was learning how to make things. I never ended up practicing as a jeweler or a silversmith, But the skills that I learned doing those things really set me up so brilliantly for starting to design furniture. The first things that I started designing were furniture. Are they in the book? Let's talk about the book.

24:40Yeah, so this book came out last year and it was, I guess it's 40 years of work. So 1984 is the year that I graduated from art school. So it's from then until now. and it was very much like a functional encyclopedia. I just wanted to chronicle everything that I'd done. This is maybe one of the better-known pieces, things like a watch that I made. I guess I was like 18 or 19 at the time. I mean, these, as you can see, these are sort of very, very kind of postmodern, an attempt at a sort of chaise longue. And this watch is when you were designing jewellery? Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was working in the jewellery department trying to make, And this was a, you know, the chairs.

25:22You know, I always wanted to design chairs because chairs were the sort of the iconic thing that designers and architects, you know, made. The hardest thing to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Richard did the chair. They did that. Do you know that chair for the Pompidou? Have you seen that? Yeah, the one. Absolutely. Yeah, they did that one. He said it was harder than designing the whole building. Yeah. Much more challenging. Yeah, absolutely. Well, some of the most, you know, obviously most of the world's most famous chairs have been designed by architects. These are beautiful. Yeah, I mean these were very much inspired by what was going on at the time in the world of architecture.

25:53But that's a funny piece. What is that? That's a bracelet with a wheel on it, which sounds like a very strange idea. So I was studying jewellery and I just wanted to make furniture in the jewellery department. So I was able to sort of twist it and liken. I said basically, furniture is jewellery. They're both kind of useless without the body. They don't kind of function without the body. and so they kind of bought that idea and thought it was going to be an interesting one and so you know i'd create pieces of jewelry that you know like sort of performance pieces that you could wear but but they functioned a bit like a piece of furniture it's beautiful do you have this i keep asking where these pieces are it's a really great question because you know a lot of this stuff i have no idea where it is i wasn't good at i know i wasn't good at keeping my own stuff i'm still not you know i'm not a i'm not a collector i know the archive the idea i'm a kind of a doer I sort of do it.

26:46And then once it's done, it's gone and sort of lives its own life. And it's out of my head. But you went from the cocoon of the school. Did you have to go work for someone then? Yeah, I had a series of sort of rudimentary jobs, but they were not fun jobs, working in department stores and working in news agencies and things like that. Oh, no, I meant a job in a design office. No, I never worked in a design office. I never worked for anyone that was doing anything like what I did or what I wanted to do. The first break that I got, I suppose, was in, I guess it was 85 or 86, a year or two after I finished my college.

27:25I applied for a grant from the government. In Australia. In Australia. From an institution called the Craft Council. They were giving money to people. And I was told I was advised by my tutors not to, you know, I was too young to apply. But I did. And I got a grant. And I think it was several thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. And I set about trying to pull together an exhibition, which I did. So I found a gallery, which was really the best gallery in Sydney at the time. And I had an exhibition in 1986 of five or six pieces of furniture that I put together. The first piece was the Lockheed Lounge.

27:58I was like, you know, 19 or something at the time. Yeah, that was the only piece in the show that got bought. But it was bought by a museum. So that was a good start. Do you think somebody could do this now? Could you have a gallery to have your own things? I'd love to think so. I'd love to think that it was possible. But the difference for me and maybe for my generation was that we had to make things. The only way I could communicate with prospective manufacturers was to show them something. It was no good showing people drawings. They wouldn't kind of buy it. You had to show them the real thing.