Where design meets business: the competing challenges of interior design

On the occasion of Artichoke’s fifth Night School – Session 5: Build Your Design Business – my thoughts turn to that muddy area in between design and the “real” world. When designing the headquarters, store or venue for a company or entrepreneur, it’s all too easy to focus on things like the functionality of the space, improving efficiency, keeping costs low, futureproofing and, of course, a fitout’s marketing power. What is important is making sure that design principles don’t get lost in the equation.

At our previous Night School in Melbourne in March, the inimitable Rosemary Kirkby had the crowd at turns amazed, confronted and in stitches over her blunt advice on how to engage with clients. Kirkby has worked on key workplaces over the last 20 years, including the landmark Campus MLC in 2001 with James Grose of BVN and, more recently, the new GPT Group with Woods Bagot. Her advice was simple: understand your client. Realize they may know nothing about design, but believe them capable of learning. If you want to get inside the head of businesspeople, why not do a business degree? And make sure that you approach this as a partnership – it is as much about you understanding your client as it is about your client understanding your design.

Crumpler Melbourne store, designed by Ryan Russell of Russell & George.

Crumpler Melbourne store, designed by Ryan Russell of Russell & George.

Image: Dianna Snape

During the recent Commercial Interiors Roundtable, held in Melbourne by the Design Institute of Australia, the friction between design and business also came up. In particular, friction between designer and client is often created because design language becomes a barrier to understanding. Of course, education about design is key, and one of the suggested solutions was to ask those clients who have had a positive and successful partnership with designers to speak about their experiences.

These are people like Sam Davy – one of the speakers at Night School session 5. Previously a creative director at Apple, Davy has transformed the urban bag company Crumpler, rationalizing their huge range of products, promoting the brand with renewed vigour and commissioning Ryan Russell of Russell & George to create a series of new stores using the Crumpler bag materials as interior design elements in their own right. (Their new Melbourne and Sydney stores feature in the upcoming issue of Artichoke, issue 36, due out at the end of August.) Trained as a designer himself, Davy spoke about his experience of becoming the client and the power of being the one with the money. But, appealing as that may sound, he warns not to forget that with great power comes great responsibility.

Westfield, Sydney, designed by Westfield Design and Construction, John Wardle and Wonderwall.

Westfield, Sydney, designed by Westfield Design and Construction, John Wardle and Wonderwall.

Image: Tony Hill

Of course, in the case of some projects, the client really does have a huge influence on almost every aspect of the design. For the Sydney Westfield shopping centre, Westfield not only bought the buildings, but had them transformed into one huge mall in the centre of the city, found all of the tenants and placed them strategically within the building. They also used their internal team for design and project management, working with external architect John Wardle and interior designer Wonderwall to create a highly curated and complex retail environment. If you want to talk to anyone about how design and the world of commerce intersect, who better?

I always thought that one of the key things that distinguish art and design is that design is useful and art is not – a chair is for sitting, a sculpture is for admiring (or changing the world, depending on the art). But, with the emergence of installation art, immersive art and design art, I’m beginning to think that usefulness isn’t design’s key distinction. Perhaps the real distinction is money. It is rare for even those artists whose work fetches big dollars to meet, let alone have a relationship with, the rich person who buys their work. On the other hand, whether you are creating a corporate interior, the next hot restaurant or a beautiful house, designers are regularly thrust into relationships with those – individuals or companies – with stacks of dosh. The choices we make with the money are what really counts.

Related topics

More discussion

See all
Bathing, ritual of healing and purification, is at risk of disappearing from our dwellings, through careless design. In praise of the bathtub

The humble bathtub is fast disappearing from our dwellings. Elizabeth Farrelly explores how the ritual of bathing is being erased through design.

The Greenary in Italy by Carlo Ratti Associati in collaboration with Italo Rota. The House of Green: Natural Homes and Biophilic Architecture

The House of Green presents the residential work of architectural practices that are treating the built and natural realms as one cohesive entity rather than …

Most read

Latest on site

LATEST PRODUCTS