Why Tom Faulkner is in the Design 100

Tom Faulkner had no formal training. After spells in picture framing and at Chrysalis Records, he began decorating a coffee table with stencils and spray paint and selling similar pieces to friends; redundancy in his late twenties became the push to go further. Needing a chair for an exhibition of his own tables, he found a small forge in Wiltshire willing to build one to his design, and was converted by metal’s strength and malleability. In 1996 he bought that forge outright, on a Swindon site once occupied by Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s railway works.

The workshop, still run from Swindon, built the studio’s language around polished or patinated steel and bronze, paired with marble, glass and leather, with decoration coming from material and silhouette rather than applied ornament. A showroom opened in Clerkenwell in 1999 and moved to the Chelsea Design Quarter in 2008. The pieces made there have since turned up on the production-design credits of Barbie, precise enough to read as film furniture rather than props.