A collaboration of serendipity, the Ten Years of Dowel Jones exhibition at the National Wool Museum is an unlikely match made in heaven.
When curating the great walls and floors of the restored 1872 bluestone woolstore that makes up the National Wool Museum, collections generally steers away from the humble chair but when it comes to the craftsmanship and considered practices of business partners Dale Hardiman and Adam Lynch of Dowel Jones, there is no denying their creations are works of arts.
10 Years of Dowel Jones
- When: Now showing until Sunday 24 November
- Where: National Wool Museum, Wadawurrung Country, 26-32 Moorabool Street, Geelong
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Founded in 2014, Dowel Jones has become a leading Australian design brand, producing award-winning furniture, lighting, ceramics and textiles and they are predominantly based in Geelong. Moving away from the flat-pack fast furniture trends, the brand was created to craft custom pieces that have longevity and life.
“The way that we run our furniture company is different to others in that we exclusively custom create every single piece for customers. We set up a point to that when we first started our business which was to not create waste,” explains Hardiman.
Straight from graduating university to going into business, Hardiman and Lynch have not only created a robust brand identity, verging on cult-like status, their pieces shine and become the statement of the home, symbolising more than just being an object but a treasure. Celebrating furniture that is colourful, dynamic and playful, the duo put in the hard yards to bring the Dowel Jones dynasty to life.
“Adam [Lynch] and I had never had normal jobs – as in we graduated from university and then did this, so the past ten years has been us doing Dowel Jones so it’s not as if we had worked for other design brands or furniture companies in the past to know the way to do it – the “this is how you build a brand”, “this is how you build brand language”. It was really just trial and error for the last ten years,” Hardiman says.
“It evolved incredibly naturally and we didn’t know it would be a full time company ten years later. That’s why our brand name is a joke. We needed to register the business and we didn’t have a name but we did have a lamp that we designed the year prior that we called Mr Dowel Jones because it was a joke on the stock exchange and then dowel referring to timber. I like to think that we named our business after a joke and ten years on that is our life.”
The big ten year celebration could not have been more perfectly timed. Approached by the National Wool Museum to be part of their exhibition program, the proposed dates happened to coincide with their decade milestone.
“Josephine [Rout, Senior Curator of NWM] reached out to me and said, “Would you be interested in presenting at an exhibition at the National Wool Museum?” – because our factories are based in Geelong, so we’re predominantly based in Geelong – and we of course said “yes” and then instantly recognised that the day of the exhibition opening was the day of our 10 year anniversary so instead of having a general exhibition we decided to celebrate 10 years.”
Opening Friday 26 July to over 130 eager eyes, The Ten Years of Dowel Jones exhibition will be presented across five months until Sunday 24 November 2024. For those picturing a showroom floor, think again. The Dowel Jones brand leans into boldness and brightness, so why wouldn’t they make that count for their diamond birthday?
“I think the exhibition is a really great display of the way in which you can present furniture in a furniture design studio. We were thinking about this Saturday night at the opening, if another furniture company were to do a show, they would more than likely present 10 years of furniture in a room for potentially seven days, they would invite clients through and then move on,” Hardiman explains.
“The exhibition runs for 5 months in partnership with a museum nearby to our factories and has 2000 people named in this exhibition on the walls of the gallery – we have credited 200 different people who have attributed to the work presented in the show. It’s a great representation of the way we work. We have brought in people from all over the world to create an object, we have a rug that 600 children from Geelong have helped to create, we have 10 artists from James Street Gallery, which is a gallery that works with artists with disabilities, so it’s really this all encompassing idea of ‘community and people make companies’. That’s what is important to us.”
Ten Years of Dowel Jones is on display now at National Wool Museum and is a must-see show.
Further details on the impressive exhibition can be found here.
