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Teknion's Routes
COURTESY TEKNION

November 9, 2021

Pearson Lloyd Views Office Furniture Differently

The U.K. design firm is part of Metropolis’s Specify Hot List 2021, and its mission is prompting people to create agile and adaptable workspaces.

By: Nigel F. Maynard

London-based designers Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd are known for their ability to unpack solutions for collaborative work and translate those ideas into highly nuanced furnishings.

Their firm has designed collections for notable heavies in the office furniture industry, including Steelcase, Andreu World, Studio TK, and Bene. Among their most fruitful partnerships is a six-year relationship with manufacturer Teknion.

 “We wanted a partner who had a forward-thinking approach in line with Teknion’s goal to evolve alongside the customer,” says Steve Verbeek, vice president of design and innovation at Teknion. Pearson and Lloyd stood out for what Verbeek describes as their “international design perspective” and “softer design language.”

The award-winning namesake firm, which Pearson cofounded with Tom Lloyd in 1997, is known for embracing its potential to solve problems. That’s a process the designers realized early on that they both enjoy. The two met at the Royal College of Art in London, where they formed a friendship and discovered a shared passion for furniture and product design. Their frequent tête-à-têtes, often over a pint or two of lager, eventually led the duo to launch their practice in 1997.

“This is the future of office furniture, adding that “pieces will be agile, loose fit, and untethered, and companies will organize their spaces differently. This will force people to address what type of furniture they have around them.” 

Luke Pearson, cofounder, Pearson Lloyd
Portrait of Tom Lloyd
Tom Lloyd (pictured) cofounded Pearson Lloyd with Luke Pearson. COURTESY PEARSON LLOYD

“I’d love to be able to say we were picky at the outset, but actually we were so green and enthusiastic that we tended to do what was offered to us because we wanted to learn what it meant to have professional practice,” says Pearson. “We just happened to be lucky that we got very nice commissions and we won some very nice projects.”

Today, although Pearson Lloyd designs products for home, health care, and aviation, the duo are especially passionate about designing systems for the workplace. “We set up our firm trying to bridge the seemingly different disciplines of product and furniture,” Lloyd says. A direct reflection of that are the flat-pack pieces of Routes, which the firm designed for Teknion. Routes’s components are engineered to allow users to create agile and adaptable workspaces; and as a bonus, that design aids in distribution and promotes self-assembly—which also leads to energy-efficient, direct-to-customer shipping that lessens their environmental impact. “This is the future of office furniture,” Pearson says, adding that “pieces will be agile, loose fit, and untethered, and companies will organize their spaces differently. This will force people to address what type of furniture they have around them.” 

Portrait of Luke Pearson
Luke Pearson (pictured) cofounded Pearson Lloyd with Tom Lloyd. COURTESY PEARSON LLOYD

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