Ron Arad: Trouble Maker

Ron Arad Trouble Maker
Twenty-two years ago, when Britain was still a design desert and no-one knew their Starck from their Sottsass, a 30-year-old Israeli �migr� named Ron Arad opened a store in London's Covent Garden called One-Off.

No-one had seen anything quite like it, or its contents, before; there were Rover Chairs, car seats converted to easy chairs on tubular steel bases, and the Concrete Stereo, a turntable and speakers encased in rough stone blocks.

There were pieces of furniture that looked like industrial units, and vice versa.

As you walked down the rough wooden stairs to the basement, your steps triggered electronic sound waves that played a jaunty-eerie tune. It was part studio, part playpen.

"Sure, people remember that place," says Arad, with a fleeting smile.

"It made a big impact. And it kind of defined my approach from the beginning.

I'm interested in designing things that didn't exist before I designed them. I'm not interested in styling the vernacular, conventional, or generic.

People can lead very happy lives just tweaking away," he says, assuming an extravagant - and, it turns out, characteristic - look of hauteur. "Me, I don't tweak."

Two decades on, we're sitting in Arad's north London HQ, a ramshackle former car showroom.

Cantilevered steel "claws" slice through a lofted studio crammed with the