Lifestyles of the rich and famous

Who could be better placed to design a foldaway director’s chair than a Hollywood actor who is used to spending hours sitting in one, waiting for his close-up? If you follow this line of thinking, you might as well have a musician designing CD racks, a footwear designer creating the perfect shoe horn and while you’re at it, why not ask a jewellery designer to draw up the plans for a velvet-lined safe? If you’re Tom Dixon, creative director of Habitat, such a notion makes perfect sense.

Deciding how to mark a milestone birthday can be a difficult process. Do you throw a big one-off bash looking back at all you’ve achieved or do you choose to do something that looks towards the future? For Tom Dixon, there was never any question. "When we started talking about what to do, initially there was a lot of talk about the 25th anniversary," he says. "For that we had taken a retrospective look at Habitat and dressed everybody up in mini skirts and so on and it all took place in King’s Road where the original shop was. I thought it would be much more interesting to do something that was forward looking." Dixon says he went back to thinking about what Habitat represented right at the beginning of the shop’s life.

"It was clear to me that something we’d lost was the idea of being involved in lots of other fields apart from our own," he says, pointing out that if you look at the early Habitat catalogues of the mid 1960s, Terence Conran’s friends had a habit of getting involved. Artists including David Hockney and Mr Chow, the famed restaurateur, modelled in the catalogue, while Vidal Sassoon did the hair of the staff who worked in the London store for a time. "It struck me that the whole thing of being involved and engaged in other people’s businesses, fashion or food or whatever, was something that had been forgotten a bit over the years," says Dixon. "And it’s something that’s coming to fruition again now. Everybody wants to be "lifestyle". But Habitat originated that idea mainly because it was interested in other stuff apart from the home."

Waiting in the wings was an idea Dixon had been mulling over for some time, but hadn’t had a good enough excuse to turn into reality. Why not ask a range of people, all highly successful in their own field, to design a product for Habitat? "It was an attempt really to get back to the early Habitat ethos and some of the people that we contacted initially were from that generation, so there was a direct link," says Dixon. "Others were people who we thought might have an attitude towards their home which was different to our own." That’s why from next month you’ll be able to buy shoe storage designed by Linford Christie, a yoga mat by Deepak Chopra and a portable leather case dreamed up by actress Kristin Scott Thomas. Ewan McGregor’s director’s chair, Sharleen Spiteri’s CD storage units and Manolo Blahnik’s shoehorn have also made the grade.

So how do you even begin organising a project like this? According to Dixon, drawing up a list of names was the easy bit: "When we were at the brainstorming-in-the-design-studio stage, we started off with people we fancied, then we moved on to people who were interesting in their professions." Having moved beyond their dream dates, the team at Habitat then sent out around 100 letters to potential collaborators. These included "humorous suggestions" of what the product might be - some of which were agreed to immediately, others provided a starting point for a long negotiation process. Some were turned down flat. "I did want a supermodel to do a mirror, but they weren’t having any of it," says Dixon. "I wanted Prince Charles to do a flower pot but he wasn’t having it either." Right from the outset, Dixon decided that there had to be an element of fun in the project, saying he didn’t want it to be just another po-faced celebrity endorsement scheme.

Dixon says he was surprised by the strength of ideas that started filtering back. As the process itself got underway, it became clear that some people were going to get stuck right in, becoming actively involved in every little detail, whereas other relationships were conducted long-distance. Dixon describes dance music duo Daft Punk as being "totally engaged" with their coffee table design, coming to London for meetings and visiting the factory in Milan. Dixon managed a trip out of the office to Brazil to meet Gilberto Gil, musician and Minister for Culture, where they were able to discuss his design for a guitar stool using Brazilian natural resources such as Tauari wood. In some cases, work commitments meant the process could only be conducted via e-mail and transatlantic phone calls. Elsewhere, it was very straightforward, as in the case of architect Jean Nouvel’s aluminium trestle table. As Nouvel has his own design office, the process of creating technical drawings and having prototypes approved pretty much meant business as usual.

But there was the odd occasion when things didn’t go as planned. From the start of the process, world champion freediver Tanya Streeter had been talking about the bubbles that float up from the great depths when you’re holding your breath underwater. From here, a discussion progressed about designing a bottle of sparkling water, but as Streeter already has a similar endorsement, a new face for the water had to be found. "We tried to get the whale from Free Willy," says Dixon. "I phoned up the people that were looking after the whale in Norway and we got him to endorse the water. But then he died."

"Each project had a different amount of input according to how much time and interest the people had," says Dixon. "Sometimes it was a really involved conversation where the people were very directional and other times it was a more casual thing with ‘I don’t like this’ or ‘can we change that’ and we did most of the legwork." As part of the process, Habitat asked their collaborators to record their thoughts about the experience. "I’ve never designed a chair before but it wasn’t so different from designing a hat," says milliner Philip Treacy. "Anything you need to know about proportion can be learnt from designing hats. I simply applied the same three dimensional equation to this project." In other cases, the "designers" didn’t actually have any design experience at all - Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea, being one unexpected example. He says he came up with the idea of a three-legged stool by thinking back to his first ever job, milking cows for my father: "I hated every minute of it, but the memory of the milking stool remains with me as an honest and practical design which I have modernised for Habitat."

Some of the VIP designs give us a little peep into their creators’ lives. The former racing car driver Stirling Moss took his office storage brief very seriously, creating the sort of sleek in-tray that could grace the chief executive’s desk. "I am a Virgo so I am very fussy about organisation. For instance, if you come to my house you won’t see a single screw anywhere. They are all countersunk and hidden away." Freediver Tanya Streeter finally got to put her bubbles in the stems of champagne glasses, and dedicates them to the safety divers who accompany her on her endurance tests. "When I dive, their bubbles are a comfort to hear, see and feel, especially in the great depths where the absence of light tests my courage and forces me to explore those same dark depths within myself."

Dixon says that the project actually highlighted some gaps in Habitat’s range. "Prior to Sharleen Spiteri’s project for instance, we didn’t have a CD rack that you can fit 500 CDs on and she said, "that’s what I need and I can’t get it anywhere." Dixon says the company usually makes storage units which hold 200 CDs, just because that’s what they’ve always done. "There was something interesting about sorting out some of the gaps we’ve got, that we’d never really thought about before."

But with all these highly successful people involved, weren’t there any monumental clashes of ego? Dixon is suitably diplomatic. "It was clear that people who have reached that status in their career haven’t got there by not having an opinion," he says.

Above all it seems that the creative team at Habitat enjoyed the chance of seeing what they do through other people’s eyes. Dixon says that as a designer, it’s all too easy to get trapped in a scenario where you spend your time looking at design magazines and going to design exhibitions and trade shows, leaving you with quite an internal perspective on what people want. "It’s opened our eyes that not everybody’s totally interested in design," he says, "but everyone’s got an opinion on their home."

If they were children, Dixon wouldn’t be allowed to tell you which are his favourites, but as products, he’s happy to share the secret of which ones he’s desperate to have at home."I think the Joaquin Cortes mirror is great," he says. "It’s not particularly interesting from a design perspective but it is as an object, reflecting everything around it." He says that the case designed by Kristin Scott Thomas has been accompanying him on his travels and is now "all battered and looking even better as a result". He’s also a fan of the Daft Punk table which, he says, has to be seen in the flesh to be fully appreciated, as it’s a "very minimal object which really comes alive when you switch it on".

As for potential bestsellers, Manolo Blahnik’s shoehorn is near the top of the list. Dixon says that normally in a collection, there would be obvious best-sellers which should sell in droves alongside objects which are more about image, looking great on the shelf and generating publicity. The VIP Collection has been unusual in that there have been a real variety of opinions within Habitat as to which items are favourites. Dixon also says some of the objects have surprised him: "Sometimes we were proved wrong - some things that I thought were appalling ended up being really quite good."

Despite the practical nightmares of the project - ranging from legal contracts to overcoming language barriers - Dixon says he would undertake a collaborative project again, but only if it was relevant. "I’m not keen on endorsement for endorsement’s sake, but there’s room for a chef because Habitat is very involved with food and likewise there’s room for a gardening expert. There’s room for all kinds of people that are beyond your common or garden designer so we’ll continue, but probably in a different way."

In the meantime, Dixon is waiting on one of his new famous friends to return the favour: "It’s just a shame that nobody’s allowed me to make a film or a record, do you know what I mean? Then I could get the compliment back."

The VIP Collection is available in-store at Habitat from the first week in September. www.habitat.co.uk