LAST MONTH, THE NEW Qantas Airways first-class lounges opened at Sydney and Melbourne airports. They are so good that you may not want to get on your flight. A marble-clad lounge with Cappellini-manufactured furniture, a spa, a library with a leather floor, a vertical garden and an a la carte restaurant are all elements of the concept designed by Australian-born industrial designer Marc Newson and his associate Sebastien Segers, the project architect. It marks the latest development in a career that combines a talent for creating sublime spaces and innovative artefacts.
A travel theme runs through Newson's work, from bikes and Samsonite suitcases, to the Qantas Airways Skybeds introduced in 2003, which marked the start of his involvement with the airline's ongoing overhaul. This year he will launch his interiors for the giant new Qantas Airbus 380. It is a job that has traditionally relied on engineers, and Newson is the first designer to enter the field.
The London- and Paris-based designer's early work focused on furniture and lifestyle products. His breakthrough came in 1986 with his amorphous Lockheed Lounge. The chair is loosely based on the 18th-century chaise longue and looks like a blob of mercury. It took him, he says, 'a couple of miserable months' of hammering hundreds of aluminium panels on to a home-made fibreglass mould. The effort was justified. Last year, the limited-edition piece was sold at Sotheby's New York for US$968,000: the highest sum ever paid for an item of contemporary furniture.
Newson admits to a fascination with the aeronautics industry - models of rockets and planes decorate his Paris studio. 'I believe that [the aviation industry] is behind the technological development of design in terms of materials, software and engineering,' he says. The fact that he doesn't know how to fly a plane (or build a building) is irrelevant. Being an outsider works for, rather than against, him.
'My job is to design,' Newson says. 'My approach to every brief is always the same. I try to improve on what is already there and to make it beautiful.' Design, he says, is basically problem-solving, 'and the problems are interesting to solve whether the object is a jet, a pair of shoes or a dish rack.'
In many respects the 43-year-old's trademark style can be traced to the heady days of the 1950s and 60s when the opening of roads, the skies and the heavens with cars, planes and rockets caught the public's imagination. He creates curvy, sensuous and colourful shapes redolent of the 60s space-age aesthetic, in a style that is described as 'retro-futurist'. Think of the Austin Powers films and you can imagine what inspired Newson's 1989 primary-coloured Felt chair and the racing green Orgone Lounge (which looks like a curvaceous surfboard), or the Pantone orange body of his Ford 021C concept car (1999) which has seats that swivel on pedestals for easy access, and the funky 60s interiors of the Mash & Air restaurant in Manchester.