Teapots, designed by Christopher Dresser, 1878-9

I'm Tom Dixon, I'm Head of Design at Habitat, I spend a lot of time with designers commissioning designs, I'm also a practising designer and manufacturer. Part of the reason I find these pieces appealing is I myself tend to take influences from a variety of eclectic sources and that's what Christopher Dresser has achieved. What we have here is somebody who's interested in everything, he's interested in engineering, he's interested in design, he's interested in decoration and many cultures and it's all reflected within the work. I mean the chair, I can spot maybe five or six influences that go from classical to tribal. Well I like the fact that it's got decorative elements, but they're very much incorporated into the structure, I mean, they come at points where there's a change in direction or a joint and they're extremely restrained for the time.

To the left of the chair you see an earthenware set of one jug and two cups that are sitting on their own tray. Now people, you know, who are designing these days are almost embarrassed of decoration, what's quite nice here is that it's almost like it could be functional, it comes at the point where he'd probably place your hands, and they're very nicely proportioned and they look like it could even pour properly. Directly below the jug and cup set we find a very heroic vase like object, I mean, here's an object that is very hard to tell whether it's contemporary or, you know, five hundred years old, so there's something that's very successful about this which is its timelessness. I feel that really, with somebody who's got so much knowledge and so much interest in various styles, I'd find him very useful in-house at Habitat today.