It’s very serious, but everything is absurd.

The co-founders of Dowel Jones, Dale Hardiman and Adam Lynch, like to do things differently. When one of their corporate partners asked if the pair would put something together for the opening of an industry event last year, Dale decided they should DJ. Because, well, that's not what other furniture companies would do, is it? He set up the decks on an ironing board (“because I thought that was fun”) and designed and printed custom jumpers. His read: ‘Our furniture is better than our music I promise’ and Adam’s read ‘Please be kind to us we’re not actual DJs’.

Dale is relating this story to me as I take in the scene before me. It’s a little Lynchian with a Wes Anderson palette. I am at ‘10 Years of Dowel Jones’ – the brand’s biggest show to date. The exhibition Dale and Adam have curated and produced is no ordinary retrospective though (see previous note about these lads doing things differently), no.

“When we started doing the exhibition, the first thing we discussed was: what would another furniture company do?” Dale says. A more conventional furniture company would probably produce a limited edition or assemble all things they have made in the past, he reasoned. So he and Adam pondered: ‘What's more interesting?’ What they came up with was a single wall in the space dedicated to nostalgia – six past designs that carry the most weight and importance in their story – but everything else has been custom made for this exhibition.

If you know anything about the Dowel Jones brand, colour is key. Inside the exhibition, custom low-pile carpet in candy apple red converges with fairy floss pink, which in turn meets lime green. This is wrapped in walls of a comparatively sedate powder blue. All of this combined and soundtracked by gentle contemporary jazz (“it had to be contemporary jazz,” says Dale) provides the ideal backdrop for the furniture and furnishings on show, while simultaneously nailing the essence of the Dowel Jones brand: there’s something serious here, but it’s mostly very fun. It’s very stylised but there’s a wink at play. It’s a deliberate dichotomy that has been on brand for Dowel Jones from the very beginning.

Dowel Jones is literally built on a joke. Dale and Adam met at university in Melbourne – drawn together as a pair of country boys acclimatising to the city. After studying together for a few years, in 2013, they decided to collaborate on a project. The result was the Mr. Dowel Jones lamp – named, you guessed it, for its dominant material of dowel and a joke on the Dow Jones stock index. The 19 and 21-year-old boys (as they were then) needed to register a business name in order to sell the thing. Did Dale think it would stick and that they would still be making lamps and furniture and other things 10 years later? No. But here we are.

While it all started with a joke, Australian manufacturing and “making hyper-local products” are two things that fall into the category of things Dale and Adam take very seriously. “Not destroying the environment for money” is another. Once upon a time, Dowel Jones was exporting containers of the furniture to the US and the dissonance with their values resulted in a signed agreement with a US manufacturer, which in turn means less revenue but a better night’s sleep. This firmly-fixed moral compass has also guided the business decision to decline multiple requests to replace existing materials in some of their collections with plastic given “it's really cost effective and it's really easy to do in this country.” In fact, the first product Dowel Jones has produced in plastic was one for this very exhibition: a reproduction of its best-selling Simon Says stool, made out of 100 percent locally sourced recycled consumer plastic that is itself infinitely recyclable.

As for Australian manufacturing, it's a riskier and more expensive way of doing things, hence why most of Dowel Jones competitors tend to manufacture their products in China, Vietnam or Indonesia, “but it's done with purpose,” Dale says. It’s also hugely convenient for Adam, who is the maker of the pair, and so lives in his old home town of Geelong where the majority of their production is carried out to oversee this side of their business. Dale, on the other hand, is the designer, and so is based in Melbourne, close to their showroom and retail site where he can remain plugged in to the local creative community he is so active in. It’s a natural division of responsibility that affords each of them the pleasures of spending time doing what they love and living where they want to live.

Dale has his own artistic and design practice outside of Dowel Jones too and in 2021, he was named 1 of the 100 worldwide game changers in design by Architectural Digest Italy. He also has six works in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. While all of this might seem terribly serious – Dale is serious about the quality of the things he makes, how they’re made, who they’re made by and the people they’re made for – he’s not one to take himself too seriously.

The Dowel Jones portraits Dale has been art directing over the past decade are a case in point. These portraits exist as a sort of raised eyebrow at the industry archetypes he observes; the way designers often look so serious in their photos. “We thought, well, we can not smile in every photo, but let's just build up worlds around us. It's very serious, but then everything is absurd.”

This sense of play is omnipresent in the duo’s work. There was the time Boom Gallery in Geelong invited Dowel Jones to produce a solo show in one of their spaces. It was the first time they had been given the opportunity to produce a solo show from beginning to end and, spoiler alert, they wanted to do things differently. “We weren’t interested in presenting furniture in the gallery because we thought the general public wouldn’t want to see a room full of chairs”. (Dale tells me “chairs weren’t that cool, like they are now”). Instead, they came up with the idea for PLAY: an exhibition featuring custom designed and manufactured adult-sized playground equipment surrounded by child-sized seating for children to sit on while their grownups played. The pieces included ‘Tilda Swington’, ‘Climbin & Garfunkel’, ‘Curley Minogue’, and ‘Rocky Bilbao’ (a seesaw that has been updated and reproduced for 10 Years of Dowel Jones).

The ‘People of Dowel Jones Big Friendly’, also part of the 10 Years of Dowel Jones exhibition, is a delightful expression of a unique aspect of the Dowel Jones brand. “Organising this exhibition, I realised we weren't representing the people on the internet,” Dale says. He speaks of his gratitude that he and Adam started a business at a time when Instagram was really taking off and questions whether they would have experienced the same success if Dowel Jones was born into a time when the only way to get noticed was via a full page ad in a glossy interiors mag.

Puns, wordplay, generally silly shenanigans (eating artisan gelato out of their upturned ‘Thimble’ stool, International Dowel Jones Free Tattoo Day, coffee table books that are actually pieces of wood, cakes that look like coffee table books that are actually pieces of wood… that sort of thing) – are very much a feature of the Dowel Jones Instagram feed. I ask Dale, ‘If there was a Venn diagram featuring all of your Instagram followers, how many of them, do you think, would say they were there for the furniture and how many would say they were there for the comedy?’ (speaking for myself, I am firmly in the intersecting middle) and Dale readily replies that most are likely there for the jokes.

While that may be so, this community has become a fertile ground for surfacing emerging design talent via Dowel Jones’ annual Design from Home competition that has been running since 2020. The competition offers anyone “interested in putting pen to paper” the chance to potentially see their design go into production with ongoing royalties to follow (plus cash prizes to boot). The runner up for the 2020 competition, CJ Anderson, is the designer responsible for the original ‘Big Friendly’. The custom version of his design that appears in the anniversary exhibition has been adorned with the names of Dowel Jones’ flock of followers. In May this year, Dale posted an image on Instagram inviting people to: ‘PUT YOUR NAME ON OUR CHAIR’. All they had to do was to comment their name on the post within seven days. The finished piece – upholstered in fabric, custom-printed in Sydney – features 1,395 names (after Georgia from the Dowel Jones team painstakingly removed all the jokes and profanities) from Dowel Jones’ global online community.

The Mr. Dowel Jones also features in the show. Besides gifting them their name, the nifty little lamp that started it all also laid some other foundations for the business. Crucially, the sales from the Mr. Dowel Jones attracted enough capital to fund Dale and Adam’s next collection and that one in turn funded the next, and on it went. Dale and Adam quickly understood they were at ease with this slow and deliberate pace of growth and have not deviated from this understanding or pace since.

“We talk actively about how many collections we should be releasing. We don't want to saturate a market with new designs, because then there are too many choices and selections for consumers to make, and then there are too many objects being produced. The less you produce, the more invested people can become with each of the objects,” Dale says.

What Mr. Dowel Jones also kicked off was a direct connection between the business’s innovations and its close collaborative relationships with its manufacturing partners. The first prototype of the Mr. Dowel Jones lamp was a combination of dowel and 3D-printed components, but it was a chance meeting with now long-term friend Ash Allen – designer and son-of-a-rubber-factory-owner – at an exhibition that prompted a shift to a rubber fabrication, and commercial success.

The origin story of Dowel Jones’ bestselling Hurdle Chair (hugely popular in hospitality settings and now manufactured in both Australia and the US) begins with Dale and Adam asking their steel fabricator: “how do you make the cheapest Australian-made piece of furniture?” “With the least amount of bends and welds,” he responded. And this is where the design language for the entire Hurdle range came from. The owner of the factory in Dandenong, on the outskirts of Melbourne, agreed to take a chance on two plucky young designers fresh out of uni (when absolutely no one else would) and today, the factory produces only Dowel Jones furniture.

Dale speaks with unfeigned admiration about each of the fabricators, craftspeople, artists, designers and community members – all Australian-based – who they have collaborated with on this varied and hugely engaging body of work. “Pretty much every collaboration we do, we end up being close friends with the people we do it with,” he says. This exhibition, on account of the generous funding and runway, has also presented opportunities to finally collaborate with some close friends who they’ve been itching to do something with. Dale is clearly energised by these relationships and the co-creation process. “The most important thing that was ever said to me when I was younger was ‘the person you are talking to is always more interesting than you are because you already know everything you know,’” he tells me.

When I ask Dale about what everything in this room means, the story it tells, he says it’s about principles. That they’re principled people. And while that’s true, the sense of community and pride of place shines brightest. Earlier in our conversation Dale reflected on a decision he and Adam took four or five years ago to stop contributing and travelling to international shows and events. “There are just so many interesting things happening here. Why wouldn't we focus our energy on what was actually happening in our own city?” And they have. There are 2000 local contributors and collaborators listed on the didactics of this exhibition. These include 634 children from Geelong who contributed their self portraits to the most captivating 10-metre-long custom printed rug that one could never bear to place a foot on. “It really is the highlight of the show,” Dale smiles.

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