For 260 years, the true protagonist — the real icon of the auction world — has been a piece of wood. And quite a piece. Christie’s London rostrum — we might call it a podium in Italian, though the word hardly captures its character as something closer to an orator’s instrument — is a mahogany object originally made for James Christie by Thomas Chippendale the Younger. Yes, that Chippendale: the surname that came to define an entire style.
A piece of wood that has survived to the present day — even though the original was destroyed during the 1941 bombings — rebuilt, reproduced and gradually elevated into an icon, almost a living monument.
So what might one expect when this long-standing protagonist meets another giant of design such as Sir Jony Ive? Careful with the answer: even expectations now require regular updates. The designer synonymous with Apple’s universe — the mind behind the aesthetic that defined an era through the iMac, iPod and iPhone, often linked to Dieter Rams’ philosophy of “less, but better” — has in recent years shown signs of gradually reintegrating the analog within the technological ecosystem. It happened, for instance, in the interior concept developed for Ferrari’s electric car, where analog gauges returned to coexist with digital surfaces.
Christie’s is now celebrating more than two and a half centuries of history by giving its rostrum a new aesthetic identity. Ive developed it with LoveFrom — the collective he founded with Marc Newson — while production has been entrusted to Benchmark, a British manufacturer specializing in solid wood craftsmanship.
The result is an object defined by continuous lines, made from sustainably sourced oak — from the same forests that provided timber for the reconstruction of Notre-Dame in Paris — with stainless steel inserts. Once again, Ive works in a listening position: listening to historical legacy, but also to the technical requirements of a device created for an extremely specific function, shaped by codified gestures and the precise postures of bodies engaged in the ritual of calling bids and buying.
That care for what cannot be seen is a fundamental part of our work.
Sir Jony Ive
And, at the risk of repeating it, it’s a podium. Not a control station for spacecraft, nor a habitable screen. It’s Rams shaking hands with Chippendale, filtered through Ive’s ability to capture the spirit of the time and distill it into the language of technique.
“We designed a restrained object,” Ive said, “one that celebrates craftsmanship and material. The rostrum is meant to elevate — both literally and symbolically — the figure of the auctioneer, providing a platform that highlights authority and expertise while proudly carrying the mark of Christie’s.”
In his words, the legacy of his relationship with Steve Jobs still resonates. “Steve often talked about the great cabinetmakers who finish the back of a drawer,” Ive recalls. “That care for what cannot be seen is a fundamental part of our work.”
Yet in this seemingly simple object one can also glimpse something larger: a signal of a shift in Ive’s trajectory after Apple. The designer who defined the aesthetic of the digital revolution now appears increasingly drawn to objects where technology and material find a new balance — where human gesture and craftsmanship return to the foreground.
A podium, then. An object almost immobile in the history of design. And it is precisely there, in perhaps the least redesigned place of all, that a statement emerges about how design moves through time — and how even its protagonists change with it.