text: With no formal training Tom started designing furniture in the early nineties. While exploring the possibilities of form and shape, he began to experiment with steel - soon recognizing how perfectly it would lend itself to his own design principles. ‘Metal was a great discovery,’ he says. ‘I was immediately seduced by its stylistic possibilities, as well as its strength, malleability, and versatility’.
  Tom has since grown his business into an award-winning and much celebrated creative success, loved by both private clients and professional interior designers for its sculptural and elegant designs, its faultless standards of quality, and exceptional service. He continues to work in steel and bronze, combining them both with marble, wood, and glass.
  Tom’s love of simplicity, geometry and strong silhouettes can be seen throughout his collection. He draws inspiration from all around – nature, architecture and his travels. Everything is made to the highest possible standards by a small team of expert welders, painters and artisans in Tom’s own UK workshop.
  All climates like exceptions. Warmer when it is cold. Cooler in the tropics. People do not resist thermal shock well. Nor do works of art. Such elementary observations have influenced the Louvre Abu Dhabi. It wishes to create a welcoming world serenely combining light and shadow, reflection and calm. It wishes to belong to a country, to its history, to its geography without becoming a flat translation, the pleonasm that results in boredom and convention. It also aims at emphasizing the fascination generated by rare encounters.
  It is both a calm and complex place. A contrast amongst a series of museums that cultivate their differences and their authenticities.
  It is a project founded on a major symbol of Arab architecture: the dome. But here, with its evident shift from tradition, the dome is a modern proposal.
  A double dome 180 meters in diameter, offering horizontal, perfectly radiating geometry, a randomly perforated woven material, providing shade punctuated by bursts of sun. The dome gleams in the Abu Dhabi sunshine. At night, this protected landscape is an oasis of light under a starry dome.
  The Louvre Abu Dhabi becomes the final destination of an urban promenade, a garden on the coast, a cool haven, a shelter of light during the day and evening, its aesthetic consistent with its role as a sanctuary for the most precious works of art.
  Permanent exhibition galleries, temporary exhibition galleries, children’s museum, auditorium, storage, conservation building, restoration workshops, public spaces, administration building, restaurant, café, retails