Furniture designer Nathan Yong is well-known for his trail-blazing career and has been credited with nothing less than advancing furniture design and furniture retail standards in Singapore. Having wanted to be a designer since the age of 15, he chose to pursue industrial design at Temasek Polytechnic as he was interested in the forms of products. His aim at the time was ‘to be as famous as Philip Starck’.

Instead, he went on to forge his own path by establishing the furniture brand Air in 1999, at a time when there were very few local producers of modern furniture in Singapore. In 2006, armed with a Master in Design from the University of New South Wales, Nathan set up the subsidiary Air Design group, of which he is the Principal Designer.

With an established and growing international profile, Nathan’s designs have been sold in Germany, Denmark, Morocco and the United States. He has also collaborated with renowned designer Toshiyuki Kita (designer of the SHARP Aquos® TV and the Wink Chair by Cassina) and multidisciplinary designers Voon Wong and Benson Saw from the United Kingdom to produce design-conscious furniture that aims to be affordable for all.

For Nathan, the journey to success had had its highs and lows. When the respected French furniture company Ligne Roset bought three of Nathan’s designs, its headquarters received a letter from its Singapore outlet asking them not to engage a Singapore designer because it would not be good business for the Singapore market. Nathan found the incident discouraging. ‘Here we were trying to break into the international market with our efforts, and there was someone from Singapore stopping us from putting Singapore on the global design map.’ At the same time, he recalls with pleasure and amusement the opening of Air Division’s first franchise in Jakarta, Indonesia. ‘I remember I was in a cab in Jakarta and saw an old man on a trishaw with trash and among that trash were Air Division wrappers and cartoons. I found that image endearing.’

Nathan’s success lies in his design philosophy. Good design, according to Nathan, is a combination of three factors. To begin with, the intention of the client and the designer must be to improve on the existing situation. ‘Design is important,’ he says, ‘but only if it improves our living conditions, not just physically but also spiritually.’ The designer must also take into account factors such as the social, cultural, historical, artistic, technological and material aspects that form the design context. Most of all, Nathan believes in being ‘honest in the design approach, and in keeping it simple’.

This design philosophy has been the key to Nathan’s success. His relentless pursuit of simplicity and honesty in design has made him one of Singapore’s top designers and has garnered him numerous awards both locally and at the international level, for instance the Red Dot Award. In 2006, the Break stool garnered a Silver Award at MINES International Design Intelligence and a Bronze Award at the Singapore Furniture Industries Council Furniture Design Award. In the same year, Nathan was also shortlisted as being among the 20 best designers in the DesignSingapore Council 20/20 series, by peer review.

Nathan’s influences are too numerous to name, but among those who have made an impression on him are the past great masters of the Bauhaus, Poul Kjaeholm, Charles and Ray Eames, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, as well as the more current Dieter Rams, Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic, Nato Fukasawa and Eugenio Perazza. He draws his inspiration from his surroundings and from the simple acts of daily life, such as a walk in the market or fixing his bicycle. Inspiration is like a lotter, he says, in which wining depends on a number of parts failing into place. As he notes wryly, ‘Sometimes it doesn’t happen.’

At the start of each new project, Nathan’s creative process includes taking into consideration numerous crucial aspects such as ‘function, materials, technology, cost, arts, form, proportion, engineering, markets, time, social, culture and wonderment, in order of importance according to the design brief’. He then changes the arrangement ‘until the result is an amalgamation of intelligence – intelligence from the distillation of informed choices’.

Nathan Yong is an exemplar to young design entrepreneurs with his winning blend of design integrity and commercial success. Success has not fazed him, and he views his accomplishments with his trademark unfussiness. When asked what sets him apart from other designers, he replies, with breathtaking simplicity, ‘I am me.’