Dowel Jones: This duo's durability tests on their furniture will surprise you

Dowel Jones is the punny alias of furniture designers Adam Lynch and Dale Hardiman. The pair launched their venture as fresh-faced graduates in 2014, having first met in university where they studied industrial and furniture design together.

In Hardiman’s words, the duo were “naive enough to start a business without caring about falling flat”.

From the outside, Dowel Jones can look like a boutique consumer brand (and you will certainly find its furniture in well-decorated homes), but the small business’s bread and butter is in supplying hospitality and commercial spaces with colourful, minimalist designs. If you’re reading this from a Melbourne cafe, you might even be perched on a Dowel Jones chair right now.

Lynch and Hardiman always wanted to make contemporary furniture in Australia, and make it affordable – not just for regular customers, but for venues, too. Their first big break came in 2015 when a version of the duo’s Hurdle chairs were requested for the Broadsheet Restaurant’s pop-up dining events.

“That was really our origin story for the first few projects,” Hardiman says. “From that, we were approached by hundreds of cafes and venues saying, ‘We would love to buy your furniture.’”

The two get a bit misty-eyed over the Hurdle range (still in production today), describing it as the thing that truly “grew the business”. It was Hurdle, too, that made them passionate about manufacturing locally.

“We were 23-and 21-years-old. I’m sure any student would understand:  if you email a manufacturer and ask for a quote, they have very little interest in speaking with you,” Hardiman explains. “Only this company spoke to us and agreed to take on prototyping and manufacturing.”

Two years later, over an emotional phone call, the duo learnt that the owner of the business had been on the verge of bankruptcy. “It’s why they’d taken on our furniture. Now, it’s been 10 years and we’ve sold enough Australian-made product for that business to continue, which I think is indicative of what design can do for local manufacturing,” Hardiman says.

Making in Australia comes with higher labour costs than overseas production, so to keep their furniture affordable, Lynch and Hardiman built a design ethos centred on collaboration.

Rather than dream up Dowel Jones concepts from thin air, they first ask their factory – a steel fabricator, for example – about how to produce a cost-effective product. In the case of the Hurdle chair – a simple, moulded plywood seat with a tubular steel frame – it meant coming up with a design that had the fewest number of welds.

According to Hardiman, the resulting design turned out like “nothing else on the market” at the time, simply because it was specific to one factory.

It’s no surprise that the pair believe good design comes from constraints. “A lot of time we don’t go seeking inspiration,” Hardiman says. “We go and visit factories and talk with them about what they’re working on.”

The duo split tasks according to their strengths – Lynch is the more hands-on and technically minded of the two, and oversees the brand’s day-to-day production in Geelong, while Hardiman, based in Melbourne, considers himself the lateral thinker.

“We have always been able to challenge each other’s thinking,” Lynch notes. “We actually have quite different approaches, which has proven to be fruitful.”

Of course, there are always hiccups in the process. Last year they excitedly sent off a new sofa design, only for the prototype to return comically small.

“It was just terribly wrong,” Hardiman laughs. “Because I don’t work in the physical most of the time, I sometimes get carried away with the aesthetic side, so it was the size of a kid’s sofa.”

The company now employs six staff and has two factories across Geelong. Timber production is done in-house, while other components like steel fabrication, wire bending and upholstering are outsourced to local businesses – though, as more local workshops close down, the goal is to eventually bring everything under the same roof.

Most pieces are made to order and offer extensive customisation – a boon for commercial clients. Hardiman likens their way of working to that of graphic designers. “We design a language, a silhouette. It’s up to the interior designer and architect to change the colours, patterns and fabrics.”

If the pair’s design process is a bit unorthodox, it’s only natural that their brand image and marketing follow suit.

There’s a cheeky sense of humour imbued in Dowel Jones, from product names – a stool with thick steel legs is deemed Sir Burly; another with a circular frame is Bradley Hooper – to the brand’s social media presence, where Hardiman likes to let loose his silliest and most absurd ideas.

On the Dowel Jones Instagram page, for example, you can watch the team hose down a chair at the car wash to show off the product’s sturdiness, use a floor lamp as a ramen bowl, or turn a scalloped side table into a cake (there are no discernible reasons for the latter hijinks, just your viewing pleasure perhaps).

When Covid rolled around, the brand also launched a competition called Design From Home, inviting anyone, regardless of experience, to submit a design for the chance to win prize money and to potentially see their creation realised.

It’s how the Big Friendly couch, a voluminous lounge with invitingly puffy arms, came to be. “We aim to be very approachable,” Lynch says, noting his pride for the community they’ve created, both online and in person.

Neither he nor Hardiman have aspirations for Dowel Jones to be a “behemoth business”, especially if doing so compromises their values. In 2018, an American company approached the pair to start exporting the brand’s designs.

They started sending 40-foot containers of Australian-made furniture to the US, but Lynch and Hardiman soon felt concerned about the carbon mileage they were racking up. In the end, they signed a partnership to manufacture the designs stateside, despite the cut in revenue.

The design duo’s primary interest lies in making furniture that stands the test of time, both physically and aesthetically. They like to test the former by literally throwing and smashing their designs (which also makes for fun viewing on social media).

“It has to be able to be sat on at an airport 1000 times a day and never break,” Hardiman says.

Aesthetic durability is trickier. In general, Dowel Jones pieces shy away from trends, and if a piece eventually does feel dated, it has at least been made in a way that makes reupholstering and repair an easy task. The pair even track Dowel Jones furniture on the second-hand market to see if their designs still resonate.

Hardiman says, “The point isn’t for us to try to sell more furniture – we don’t want people to get rid of it.”

When they look back at the last decade, Lynch and Hardiman are most proud of supporting businesses around them. The partnerships and collaborations, whether with manufacturers and fabricators, local artists or their online audience, have all contributed to Dowel Jones’s success.

The brand’s next collaboration is characteristically unexpected.

To celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Lynch and Hardiman will produce 10 different projects, one of which involves working with kids at Geelong’s Museum of Play and Art. “It’ll be a few hundred children creating this work,” Hardiman says with a smile. “They’re going to be the artists and we’ll be the manufacturers.”

Stay tuned for the oddball creations – one may just end up in a lounge room near you.