Ross Lovegrove knows where things are heading next. In design, tech, culture and business, his future-focused mindset is why he was the first product designer to use carbon fibre. It’s why he built the world’s largest 3D printing lab; why he has worked with Apple and Airbus; LVMH and NASA; why his concept designs for Renault have laid the groundwork for the vehicles it will produce in 2050; and it’s why we can claim to be one of the most important designers of the last 50 years. It’s also why he is now moving to the place that he identifies as being the next global design hub: Dubai.
Ross Lovegrove is, he concedes, rather down on the country where he has made his career. “The UK is a very resistant place at the moment. There’s the taxation, the wet politics and bad decisions, the poor infrastructure, the lack of professionalism and lack of government support for design. And then there is the weather,” bemoans the acclaimed industrial designer. “That’s the one bad thing about the move. I’m a celt so I can’t stand the heat either. Anything above 20 degrees and I get a sweat on.” The move of which Lovegrove speaks is to Dubai.
It’s been a some time coming, with Covid finally bringing the realisation that he and his team had long worked remotely anyway, and bringing too the question of why he was paying for a huge amount of real estate in Notting Hill, one of London’s more expensive areas. “I’m 65 now,” he says. “My father died a long time ago but my mother died during the pandemic. And I have a young family now. So it feels like I have the opportunity for a fresh start. It is tough to jump ship and start again. But it’s necessary.”
And so, early this month, Lovegrove, his very new wife, creative director Ila Colombo, and their daughter Ocean, upped sticks and lay down new roots in the 450sqm penthouse they have bought in JVC. “With a porter, swimming pools, underground parking and a gym for what I’d pay in council tax [a property tax] in the UK. Like I said, I’m after the path of least resistance,” Lovegrove chuckles.
But why not Milan, or New York, or Tokyo, or Stockholm, or one of the other globally-recognised ‘design cities’? Why, it may seem, Dubai, of all places? After all, Lovegrove’s reputation opens doors all round the world, best known as he is for utilising the latest technology to create the futuristic, organic forms that have become his signature—from water bottles to bicycles, chairs to lighting, bathroom sets to speakers, staircases to concept cars. Along the way the Welshman has helped worked with Sony, Apple, Louis Vuitton, Luceplan, Hermès, NASA and Motorola, among many others.
While industrial designers may be less well known than their fashion counterparts—lacking the latter’s PR machine, and because client manufacturers often want to claim the glory—you may know Lovegrove for his Red Dot award-winning Ergo chaise longue for Natuzzi Italia, his Go Chair—the first ever seat made using magnesium—or his Supernatural chair for Moroso, made, back in 2005, from a single piece of reinforced polypropylene. Or there’s the carbon fibre Moot chair, the Twin’Z electric concept car for Renault—presented 10 years ago—or his fragrance bottle for Formula 1, creating a exoskeletal form using additive 3D printing when most had never heard of such a process.
As may now be clear, he something of the experimentalist, and loves toying with the latest implements and materials. “Ironic as it may seem, but it’s my interest in depth and permanence that pushes me towards hyper-modern, hyper-futuristic things, because I’ve also learnt that’s it’s death to follow the rest, to do what’s already been done,” Lovegrove
explains.
“My feeling has always been ‘why live now, in this window in time, if you don’t access and use the tools and possibilities of the time you live in?’. What is the point of making a vase in the way you could have made it in the past? That just leads to yet another consumer object. Not doing things the way they’ve always been done may take longer but ultimately the things that are realised have a rare complexity to them.”
But back to the question: why not move to one of the more obvious cities for a designer of his calibre? The answer is two-fold. On the one hand these fabled design cities aren’t doing much better than London, Lovegrove suggests.
The post-pandemic, economically fragile years, he argues, have seen design communities in many countries—and the governments that support them—enter a retrenchment that has inspired a kind of design nationalism not good for internationalists like Lovegrove. “Much as I don’t think London is doing much to support its designers now—meaning the design culture is just spinning on its axis, somewhat—the same can be said for the likes of Milan,” he opines. “It’s all become a bit provincial and inward-looking.”
But this isn’t to say Lovegrove has selected Dubai as an entry some way down a long list. Rather he sees Dubai, in a way, as a city state existing very much in “this window in time”. It’s city state as tool. It has, he stresses, very much so been selected for its own merits, albeit with a little initial struggle.
“It was my wife that suggested we move here many months ago, and I told her ‘No way. It’s too hot. It’s soulless. There’s no greenery’. All the things people who don’t know Dubai well say about it. We had an enormous argument and I almost slept on the sofa that night,” recalls Lovegrove with a laugh.
But, he adds, it got him thinking. His conclusion, having visited Dubai half a dozen times over his career, and having recently received a warm reception to a talk he gave at the Museum of the Future? More than that, having experienced a moment of simpatico there “with the people who clearly just get it, who came up to me after wanting to just talk about so many different subjects”?
That Dubai is fast becoming not a global design hub but—and in moving his family and everything he owns there he’s placed a big bet on this: it’s becoming the global design hub. This is more than the tax arrangements, though of course he admits that helps. It’s more than the location, being ideal as it is for his work both back in Europe and looking east to China.
It’s even more than what Lovegrove has found to be its rare quality of connectivity—not the wifi, but good old person to person. “People here want to connect you to other people,” he enthuses. Sure, Dubai may have been critiqued in the west. It can be very expensive. It has its own distinct class divides and some of the drivers are crazy. It’s not an idyll. But, stresses Lovegrove, more than anywhere now, it has the state of mind right for progressive design.
Witness, he says, the UAE government doing all it can—sorting visas and the like—to expedite Lovegrove’s move in double-quick time. “Design isn’t what many people [outside of the design industry] think it is. It’s not about making nice cushion covers—and I don’t know how anyone who retreads that kind of product over and over makes a living,” says Lovegrove. “Design is about bringing together like minds to explore what society could be. It’s about thinking in a utopian way really. It’s about being able to have the right interesting conversations and an openness to new ideas. And I genuinely feel that in Dubai. Maybe it’s because it’s a young place—it’s a new community and very international in its make-up, and lacks baggage. But it strikes me as being like a refuge for like-minded people. It’s place that’s interested in space and energy and technology and architecture, a readiness to research new tools like AI, in all the future- leaning stuff that gets me excited”
“I was driving my daughter to to school the other day and said to her that one day she would drive herself,” he adds. “And then caught myself and thought ‘well, actually, you likely still will be driven—by an autonomous car’. A culture that embraces the potential in technology like that is the kind of place I want her to grow up in. And Dubai reminds me of when I used to work in Silicon Valley.”
But what does Lovegrove plan to do when he’s got his feet under his Dubai desk? In the longer run he would like to establish an art, technology and design lab—“something akin to Dubai’s own MIT”, referencing the famously progressive Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
More immediately, he’s already in the process of setting up two companies to look at ways of collaborating with local architects and developers with a view to what he calls “sensualising the public environment”—improving movement through the city—“and using technology and art to inspire a sense of wonder and belief in the future”—precisely, in other words, what he has felt has been lacking back in the UK for the best part of a decade. And then there’s the roster of panels he’s been invited to be on, including one on behalf of HUNA, a premium real estate brand launched by the developer ARM Holding (the lead partner of Art Dubai). In other words, he is busy getting his foot in the door, and being invited to put his foot in. What comes of it all the next few years will reveal.
“How it will all work for me in Dubai is really an unknown right now,” says Lovegrove. “But, you know, that’s great—diving into the unknown is what keeps you alive. Right now I’m running on adrenalin, but I feel like I’ve somehow left the past—exited the antique shop—and taken a step into the future into a hi-tech society. I’ve got to seize the moment.”