PETER COOMBS goes by the title designer, jeweller and metalsmith, but eyewear is the vehicle that has taken him around the world and into the presence of people like Sir Elton John. From his South Australian studio, he speaks to Insight about his love of creating handmade luxury eyewear.
In a modern eyewear world dominated by computer-aided design (CAD), mass production, large margins and a handful of materials, speaking with Mr Peter Coombs feels like seeking shelter from the harsh elements of a capitalist society.
Every piece of eyewear he constructs is deliberate, considered and crafted with artisanal expertise. His creations are brought to life in a studio adjacent to his Adelaide home – one of those “lucky finds” once owned in the 1880s by a family working with farm machinery. Stepping inside the workshop today, one will find Coombs surrounded by various hand tools, machines and drawings he uses to form and colour various precious and refractive metals into luxury eyewear.
Some of these are one-off commissioned pieces, while others form part of collections with anywhere from 10 to a few hundred units, purchased by eyewear lovers globally. Price points start at $950 and, in rare cases, can reach five figures – and everything in between.
“I recently had a lady who tried on an existing frame, and I said, ‘You know I could make that three millimetres shallower and it would be much better’. That’s the beauty of what we’re able to do, instead of being stuck with ‘almost right’,” he says.
“Maybe the optometrist selling glasses wants people to keep buying more, but I make and design my eyewear with such care that it’s got potential to last forever – I don’t want it to break. I’ve had frames come back and I’ve refinished them; being raw titanium that we’ve re-polished or ceramic-coated to transform them. There are no lost components.”
It’s this attention to detail that has allowed Coombs to carve a niche for almost four decades as one of Australia’s foremost eyewear designers. His expertise is complemented by his wife, Rebecca, who he considers a “marketing genius” involved with the development of collections and the driving force behind various campaigns.
Coombs’ frames have been recognised with international design awards in Japan and Australia and appeared in museums and private collections globally. They have also been worn by the rich and famous, including actress Raquel Welsh, Richard Pryor’s wife or European football managers – often unbeknownst to him until someone makes a throwaway comment, he’s tagged on social media or is contacted for a repair.
“You make these beautiful things and then you send them out to the wild,” he says.
“Some mornings I wake up to messages from America, Italy, Greece or wherever with people who have been checking out the website, saying they are interested in certain pieces, and you often wonder how you ended up at the end of their rabbit hole.”
But not all clients emerge in this fashion. The most famous wearer of Peter Coombs Design Eyewear is Sir Elton John who owns 26 pieces from the South Australian.
It was a relationship that started in 1987. Only two years earlier, Coombs had made his first pair of spectacles while studying for a Bachelor of Design (majoring in Jewellery and Metalsmithing) at the University of South Australia. At the time, people were concerned about Pine Gap, Roxby Downs, the Cold War and there was acid rain in Europe. They were reminiscent of ‘Jules-Verne-under-the-sea-the-apocalypse-is-coming’ which he says was the happening thing in the 1980s – “clunky but funky”.
By 1987 he ventured out to Los Angeles to showcase some jewellery designs. He was amazed at how freely people shared their contacts, leading him to l.a.Eyeworks, a cool boutique on Melrose Avenue frequented by those seeking luxury eyewear.
“I sat down with one of the owners and she was looking at my stuff and began asking how I did certain techniques – it was an interesting meeting of the minds,” he recalls.
“In the conversation I said, ‘I’d love to get my frames on someone like Miles Davis’. I was 21 at the time, and she gave me that smile your great aunt gives when you’ve said something charmingly naïve. But the first frame she bought from me became Elton’s in two or three days.”
What unfolded was a “surreal” client relationship through the 1990s for Coombs who created eyewear for Elton and many others.
“Apart from what used to go through l.a.Eyeworks, I saw him before concerts a few times,” he says. “This was a time before mobile phones, and you’d get a message on your answering machine or a fax, and sometimes you’d wonder if it was a prank. You’d get details of a meeting in a hotel or sometimes backstage at a concert, and then show up with your creations.”
Knowing your limits
Doing business with musical royalty sits in contrast to a childhood that Coombs spent in a rambling seaside house in Adelaide – where his love for materials began. The wooden rear section of 1800s era house was partly pulled down and rebuilt, so he and his siblings were never short on supplies to build treehouses, or control panels for spaceships.
“We had hammers, nails and screws – and we had space, there was just so much freedom.”
With an accountant father, his business-orientated family offered seed investment to other businesses. At one stage they owned a Paddle Steamer which did five-day cruises on the Murray River.
“My weekend job was working in the galley and cleaning. It was the analogue age, so there were always people around; fitters and turners, blacksmiths, and carpenters to work alongside and learn from.”
At the University of South Australia, he made all sorts: rings, pendants, perfume bottles, knives, goblets, plus more. But when he wasn’t creating, he was at the beach, and it occurred to him that he could make his own eyewear.
“It turned out I was pretty good at it. I loved that there was no hard and fast way. The only proviso is you’ve got to have a way to hold two lenses in front of the eyes.”
Sterling silver, nickel and black chrome were the first materials he used. Today, he performs a lot of titanium and aluminium forming.
“A big part of materials is learning to play with them and testing them until they break. You need to see how far you can push something before you gain a good understanding of what’s possible,” he says.
“Working with titanium, there’s so many grades. There’s super hard titanium that’s almost impossible to drill. At the other end, how do you find that balance of bending something that’s not going to crack and – if a client stands on it – it’s not a total throwaway and you’ve got that ability to restore it. Similarly, some processes result in the titanium being ‘gem-hard’ which is hard to work and bad for your tools.”
While Coombs endeavours to do as much as he can in-house, he also relies on a network of like-minded people for materials, and components that he brings together in his studio. If he doesn’t have the machinery, he leans on other artisans, or thinks of ways around the problem.
“Even with a one-off piece, I’m thinking now if we had to make 10 or 100, am I able to replicate it? That’s often in the back of my mind because it’s always a possibility. To me, that’s a smart way of operating because otherwise you tend to overcomplicate things,” he says.
“Whilst I’m not a minimalist designer, I am a fan of minimalism. It’s thinking about whether we can use two screws instead of three, without affecting the integrity. Can the screws come from above instead of below where they would be more likely to fall out?”
While form and function are the cornerstones for his regular clientele, there are times when Coombs uses trickery to achieve a certain look. This is the case for film sets where he is commissioned to create eyewear that reflect a certain era or appear to degrade over time. It’s also not unusual to see a public demand surge for a certain frame immediately after a movie airs.
In the film Escape from Pretoria, filmed in Coombs’ hometown, he designed the eyewear worn by star actor Mr Daniel Radcliffe, best known for Harry Potter.
“It’s a beautiful frame, and the irony is that despite it being designed for a 1970s biopic, the frame is very ‘now’,” he says.
“Daniel’s Harry Potter character is synonymous with round frames, so it had to be as far from the circle as possible. The frames I make for people seeking eyewear featured in a film aren’t made identical because when you’re doing film work, there’s some smoke and mirrors.”
Interestingly, Coombs made three sets of the same frame for Radcliffe in the film.
“It was the same when I worked on the various Gallipoli films a few years ago. In one case, the main character had four or five frames to show before the Tobruk landing, after the landing, and several years later. How do you make it look really hammered, but at the same time, ensure it can hold together while filming? The frames in one film varied from those worn in the trenches, to a pristine gold pair worn by Winston Churchill’s character.”
Although Coombs is appreciative of the at-times public nature of his work, it’s the regular people with a passion for eyewear – those who buy one or two frames per year – that mean the most.
“Because you know it’s a big deal for them to spend a few thousand dollars on something that’s a wearable piece art. They have decided this is what I want, and this is how I’ll represent myself. Some of those people have been my clients since the 1990s.”
He will always appreciate how eyewear can transform a person’s look, and that he’s been able to carve a career out of it.
“It’s about the sort of shape we can overlay on a face to essentially create an optical illusion,” he says. “There’s tricks in the design that can make a face look larger, smaller or more normal sized, even to the point that you’re kind of giving them a face-lift.”
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