This Australian retailer wants to ensure you’re sitting comfortably
By Robyn Willis
Mon, Sep 4, 2023 11:46am
4 min
4 min
When the newly appointed CEO of King Living, David Woollcott, first started with the Australian furniture retailer last year, he admits he was puzzled by the price point for their popular range of sofas.
“I was questioning why we don’t charge more for our product,” he said. “With the Jasper (sofa), which starts from around $4000, we could charge $7000 or $8000.”
The galvanised steel-framed sofas, which come with a 25-year warranty, have a strong following in Australia where they are a popular choice for those looking for affordable style that will last. The range includes sofas and armchairs in a variety of styles designed to be flexible enough to suit any space, or lifestyle, at a price point that is deliberately accessible.
Central to the success of King Living, which started as a mother and son enterprise with David King and his mother Gwen in the 1970s, has been the decision to keep design, manufacturing and retailing under the one roof. Woollcott said it places King Living in a rare position in the market.
“We are in control, which is exciting for the consumer,” he said. “We know how our product is made and where the materials are sourced and we are acting as one entity. That instils trust.”
It also means there are no additional players looking to add further costs.
“We don’t support a third party, so the additional margin we invest in quality,” he said.
King Living has marked their time in the Australian market with the re-release of its first piece of furniture, now known as the 1977 sofa. A surprisingly contemporary-looking chair designed to be ‘built’ piece by piece to create a modular sofa of your choice to suit small or large spaces, it embodies the kind of relaxed elegance Australian design has become known for.
It’s a design aesthetic and business model Woollcott said has been embraced as King Living expanded into markets in Singapore and Europe in recent years with North America to follow.
“What delineates us is that we are a designer, manufacturer and retailer of furniture — that is really unique,” he said. “There are many businesses who do the retail bit and they source from factories around the world. But we are in control, which is exciting for the consumer.”
While the size of living spaces vary significantly across Europe, Asia and North America, Woollcott said there is enough variation and flexibility in the range to accommodate customers’ needs, whether it is the generous proportions of the Jasper and Kato sofas or the more compact Aura and Fleur designs. While best known for their sofas, King Living also has an extensive range of dining furniture, as well as beds, floorcoverings, lighting and storage options. Their outdoor furniture range is also gaining a strong following, taking the same approach to the design and construction of their interior furniture and translating it for outdoor spaces.
And it’s not just the Australian market taking notice.
“Australian design is globally loved because it has a casual nature to it,” he said. “It’s informal, which doesn’t mean it is less sophisticated or less detailed.
“Coming from the UK where it is all about the class structure and formality, Australia is the antithesis. It’s warm, approachable and casual.”
Having spent the past five years in Europe as managing director of Fisher & Paykel UK & Europe, Woollcott is aware that customers are increasingly concerned about the sustainability of their products. The ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ ethos is nothing new to King Living, he said.
“What stunned me when I met (founder) David King, they have acted sustainably from day one because they have made that link with waste not being a good thing,” he said. “It’s all about resources. I don’t think there would be a business leader out there who would not see the link between preserving resources and saving money.”
King Living also offers their King Care service, a commitment to recover or completely refurbish sofas for a cost, whether they were manufactured in 1977 or 2023.
While it may seem like a lot of fuss over a sofa, Woollcott noted that this key piece of furniture is often the backdrop to family life for years.
“Memories are made on our furniture and the sofa can end up becoming a member of the family,” he said. “Our furniture is designed to last for generations — and to be reconditioned.
“They take on a personality of their own.”
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
By
Thu, Sep 3, 2026 5 min
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
