Australian product design has come a long way over the past decades. While there were great local furniture and industrial designers in the fifties and sixties such as Grant Featherstone, Clement Meadmore, Gordon Andrews and Douglas Snelling to name but a few, these days a new breed of designer is taking the lead – not just in Australia but around the globe.
Today, Adam Goodrum, Trent Jansen, Adam Cornish, Dale Hardiman, Tom Fereday, among many other designers of note, conceive objects that are highly sought after, with the days of the cultural cringe are well and truly over. Add another name to the list of contemporary design heroes and that is Charles Wilson, a visionary designer who keeps on creating with style and passion.
Wilson came to design by chance, first hearing the term ‘Industrial Design’ in school. Without even knowing what Industrial Design was he thought it sounded interesting and decided to study it, subsequently finding that it suited his interests perfectly.
After receiving a Bachelor of Industrial Design from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), he joined with fellow graduates and co-founded the Argo Collective where the group developed experimental furniture and decorative objects for manufacture. This was an exciting and productive time, and Wilson created his first successful production design, the SW1 Swivel chair for Norman + Quaine. The chair was acquired a few years later in 1996 by Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences.
Soon Wilson was in demand and the SW1 Swivel Chair was picked up by the then-groundbreaking company Woodmark, founded by Arne Christiansen, and the designs flowed with the Heron Chair, Boulder, CP1 Sofa and many others displayed on the showroom floor.
Since then, it’s fair to say that Wilson is always designing, whether for companies such as Menu or Herman Miller overseas, or King Living, Tait and Broached Commissions at home. His collaboration with King Living is now some 15 years strong and still Wilson is contributing to and creating myriad pieces for multiple collections.
Take the Zaza sofa that has many iterations made for inside with a range for outdoors as well; or William, another sofa range that is casually elegant. Then there is the beautiful Seymour Chair and ottoman, as well as the Lode ottomans, Luna stools and Solifiori standing and pendant Lights, all designed by Wilson. There is no doubt that this designer has contributed much to the success of King Living through his design prowess and they are, in turn, supporting him to further extend his creativity.
While his talent is prodigious, he is versatile and working with Tait, the Zephyr Lounger was born in 2022 and won The Object category at the INDE.Awards that year. Wilson is also a Founding designer of Broached Commissions and among his work, his Tall Boy is singular in its creation and form.
While times have changed for Australian designers, Wilson still draws by hand but is also happy to utilise technology. “Typically, I do rough sketches and this leads on to full-scale drawings. So literally, we’re talking A0 sheets of paper, sticky taped onto a wall because I want to see the proportions in real life. A big change, though, is that in the early 2000s I took the leap to 3D modelling and that changed everything about how I work with clients. I really embraced that as I love precise complex forms, and the way that 3D CAD can facilitate such minute adjustments down to a fraction of a millimetre. Naturally, if we’re talking about upholstered furniture – a sofa – it’s not the same, because you have to work with the experts in arriving at the forms, being governed by foam and feather and fabric. But in the more industrial design type projects where I’m designing an object, such as a candelabra or a shoehorn or products I’m currently developing, then it’s very much about perfecting the form in the program,” Wilson explains.
So, what is Charles Wilson currently working on now? For the last few years there has been a collaboration with Andrew Simpson of Vert Design working with an exciting new material which can replace plastic. The new idea and brand is called BOLO and it is a rethink of single use takeaway food packaging. Hopefully there will be a launch later this year and we can discover more about this exciting venture.
While Wilson likes to follow through a design one at a time, with the back and forth of prototyping and waiting periods, it’s not always possible to concentrate on just one design. There are always a few concepts on the go and each receives the Wilson attention when required.
Each designer has their way of working and Wilson is no different: “I’m interested in identifying a particular problem, and it might not be a pressing problem in the world – it might just be an innovative way to resolve the form of something around a particular function. So, it’s very industrial design 101 in a way, but that’s still what inspires me.”
Reflecting on changes that he has seen in Australian design over the last decades, Wilson reflects: “One change that’s worth touching on is the industry itself and the development of adventurous local brands. It seems not long ago that we Australian designers would tread the halls of Salone [del Mobile, Milan], hoping to capture the interest of a European brand and our success rate, on the whole, was miniscule. There were a few exceptions, including my early connection with Menu, but even the most successful of my contemporaries had little success. Nowadays, most could scarcely be bothered as there are better options locally. You only need to look at the work that Adam Goodrum and other designers have done with local brands such as Nau and you see that local opportunities offer more promise than heritage European brands.”
I first met Charles Wilson at the 2006 Bombay Design Discovery Awards in Sydney which, of course, he won with Spool, an innovative stool. He is still passionate and forthright in his ideas that are cloaked in a quiet demeanour, however, his talent has simply kept developing, so that now it speaks for itself. Keep the great design coming Charles Wilson – we are all the richer for your creativity.
Charles Wilson
charleswilsondesign.com
