Australian industrial designer Marc Newson comes up with unique products from a consumer's perspective

. "I tend to pick projects based on what I want or need [these days], on purely selfish terms. And I've always wanted a decent toaster. A wheelie-bag too," says the acclaimed Australian industrial designer. "I try to look at things from the perspective of a consumer. What could they want? What do I want? And the list is getting smaller."

Small wonder: a survey of his output includes pens and bunk-beds, jets and dish-racks, rocking horses and Champagne bottles, kettles, torches, mobile phones, restaurants and shops, mirrors, taps, chairs, cars, coffee cups, lights, shotguns, clothes and watches, for brands as diverse as Hermès, Montblanc, G-Star and Apple; he designed its smart watch in collaboration with his friend Jony Ive.

Newson is also the creative director of Qantas Airways, and the designer of the Lockheed Lounge, an aluminium-clad chaise longue that in 2015 - for US$3.7 million - became the most expensive piece sold at auction by a living designer to date.

He has pieces in the permanent collections of more than 20 museums around the world and is one of just a handful of designers whose name - a brand in its own right - has come to transcend his designs. Not that Newson is all that comfortable with that idea.

He's the amiable Aussie, the space-fixated, Jetsons-loving kid with an art school-trained mother with the vision to take him out of education for a year to travel around Europe, and a grandfather who encouraged him to take everything apart and re-build it. He's the student who studied jewellery design - learning to weld, solder, rivet - and persuaded his tutors that he should be able to enter a chair as a project, since a chair was, in a sense, something one wears.

"My job is to find solutions, so I have to know the problems - so the more exposure to the problems out there the better my response will be," Newson explains. "Travel helps. But I work across such a broad space, many different types of industries that it's important, as I think it is for any designer, to have a comprehensive understanding of contemporary culture. And I don't think designers generally do. I don't think architects or even artists do either. Many are so mono-dimensional in the way they approach things."

Newson spends about half of his time away from London where - after stints in Tokyo and Paris - he has made home along with his wife and two daughters. But he is well used to being in client meetings. "Design is a slow process - everything takes a minimum of two years so there are plenty of opportunities during the course of the project to change things - or to kill an idea," he says.