Simon Lowe
Inspiriting Designer
“I hope that when I make furniture I’m creating more than a chair, table or bed: I hope that I’m making a piece whose existence will humbly make the world a better and more wondrous place to live. A chair, for instance, allows us to sit and rest, which in turn allows us to run, dance and laugh. It is a small gesture celebrating everything beyond itself.”
Simon always returns to the sea somehow, ever since he watched the Indian Ocean from the beaches of East Africa twenty years ago. On his return to the UK from Africa he learned to sail, and progressed to working as a professional yachtsman for several years. He continued to race yachts every weekend in the Solent even as he studied for a degree in Semitic Languages in London. Having finished university he finally set upon the course that has carried him through until today, very recently graduating with a Master of FIne Arts in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, and founding Simon Furniture Design.
Nine years ago, he started working as a builder’s labourer, digging holes and mixing cement. Then he began taking on some carpentry work. He learned on the job. He gutted and refitted the boat that he was living on, then another. Other people needed work doing on their boats and houses, and very soon he had a small carpentry business. Restless as ever though, he packed up one day and headed across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. In Antigua he worked for four years at Chippy Fine Yacht Woodwork. During this time, as well as a summer in Palma, Mallorca and another in Newport, he had the opportunity and privilege to work on very many of the world’s most prestigious superyachts.
“I have spent 20 years acquiring diverse skills and experience and now have an enormous sensory vocabulary with which I believe that I can transform functional items of furniture into individual pieces of beauty, which you will want to touch, feel, smell, stare at, consider and use- and if you listen very closely to them maybe you will hear the sound of the sea.”
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