Established in 1976 in the north east of Italy, Magis designs without boundaries from an Italian company. The company’s success is based on the desire to provide a broad swathe of users with access to high functional and technological quality products for the home, developed in partnership with major international designers, with a vision of the resulting products that is ethical and poetic as well as aesthetic.
Magis products that are all 100% “Made in Italy”, are a guarantee of high quality, in line with the firm’s tradition, which has developed from its craftmanship and cultural roots, through the evolving styles and industrial growth of the eighties and nineties, and continues to comprise one of the company’s greatest and most valuable assets.
Marc Andrew Newson CBE (born 20 October 1963) is an industrial designer who works in aircraft design, product design, furniture design, jewellery, and clothing. His style uses smooth geometric lines, translucency, strength, transparency and tends to have an absence of sharp edges. Newson was born in Sydney, Australia, and in 1984 he graduated at the Sydney College of the Arts in Sydney, Australia studying jewellery and sculpture. In 1986 he was awarded a grant from the Australian Crafts Council and staged a first exhibition featuring the Lockheed Lounge. The following year he moved to Tokyo, where he lived and worked until he moved to Paris in 1991 where he set up a studio. He describes his 1988 Embryo Chair as “one of the first pieces where I hit upon a discernible style”. He co-founded the Ikepod watch company with Oliver Ike in 1994, leaving the company in 2012.In 1997 he moved to London, where he and business partner Benjamin de Haan set up Marc Newson Ltd though he still has a house in Paris. He is currently adjunct professor in design at Sydney College of the Arts (where he first studied sculpture and jewellery) and is the creative director for Qantas. In 2005, he was selected as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of the year. His work has become amongst the highest selling in auctions. One of his three Lockheed Lounge chairs sold for $968,000 at Sotheby’s in 2006, and £1,100,000 at a 2009 auction at Phillips de Pury & Company. At the 2006 Design Miami fair he produced 12 Chop Top tables, all of which sold out in 20 minutes at an estimated $170,000. In April 2015 his Lockheed Lounge chair sold at auction for £UK2.4 million ($AU4.69 million), making it the most expensive object ever sold by a living designer. Every year he races one of his four vintage sports cars – an Aston Martin, a Lamborghini, a Ferrari and a Cisitalia, in the Italian Mille Miglia and was quoted as saying: “I’m not a motor head, I don’t like the new versions of any of those cars.” Newson was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to design. He joined Apple Inc. in September 2014.
