While working for Apple alongside good friend Jony Ive on special projects, like the Apple Watch, industrial designer Marc Newson found time to devote his celebrated sensibilities to two very simple objects.
Behold his take on the toaster and the teapot. Simple and clearly fitting for kitchens right now and 100 years from now.
Newson created the kitchen items for Sunbeam Australia, which will make them available for sale later this month. You can see them in all five colors, retro shades of blue, pale green, orange, red and yellow, here.
The 52-year-old Australia native is prolific with a portfolio that includes shoes (Nike), a beer machine, pens, faucet fixtures, a shotgun and a concept car. In the same year he took on two humble appliances, he also broke the record for the most expensive design object ever sold at auction, a Lockheed Lounge chair he designed in 1986 that went for $3.9 million just this year.
Photo: Cult of Mac file
Newson recently told the Australian Financial Review that he was fascinated with the construction and design of objects he found in magazines but could not find growing up in Sydney. So in a sense, he has designed objects he always wanted.
But the inspiration for the toaster and teapot comes from a different place in his design eye.
“I was attracted to the job because I’d never designed a kettle or a toaster before,” Newson told AFR’s James Chessell. “These are objects my family use practically every day.”
Newson’s eye for detail was “remarkable,” according to Sunbeam’s head of design, Peter Cooper. Details like metal pieces on the areas of the kettle that get touched, like the knob on the lid or the on/off switch. “(It’s) simple general form but execution down to the millimeter,” Cooper said.
Newson told AFR he spends about 60 percent of his time on Apple projects and described the company’s work environment as having uncompromising standards and resources found nowhere else. He is happy to be a part of it.
“There are really not many things that can’t be done there,” he said. “If a process or a technology doesn’t exist then it will be invented.
Source: AFR and Fast Company
