Design stories – Behind the scenes with Benoy Interiors, ‘working hard and staying humble’

When I arrived in 2021, there was just a small interiors team at Benoy and it was primarily retail focused. Since that time, we’ve grown and diversified, expanding into new sectors and service areas such as hospitality, aviation, retail-led mixed-use and branded retail fitouts. We’ve also expanded geographically, moving into buoyant markets such as the Middle East and other new markets such as the US. 

Coming out of covid, we began to win work in KSA and UAE, which have become real growth areas for us. We brought in experts to help drive and grow various sectors, such as Alasdair McNab, who has a wealth of branded retail experience and is now working on some cool fit-out projects; Visnja Ciric, who leads our Middle Eastern hospitality and is now working on five-star Hospitality and Branded Residential projects; and Ben Perman, who focuses on experiential mixed-use retail-led interiors with landlords/​owners/​operators globally. In fact, over the past three years we’ve solidified the core team, which is now 30 strong, enabling us to seize new opportunities arising from the post-pandemic resurgence in travel and tourism. Things have moved very fast, but we’ve kept our feet firmly on the ground. 

We’ve worked hard to build strong relationships and provide clients with great design service. We’ve also not lost sight of who we are, which I think is really important. We run a no-ego policy in the department; we all work hard and stay humble. It’s about maintaining our core values and not getting too carried away . I also moan quite a lot, which keeps myself and others grounded! As I see it, moaning is actually all about continual improvement and the pursuit of excellence. In fact, I think grumpiness is hugely undervalued as a quality! 

The culture we’ve created encourages people not to take things too personally. We just have to excel in what we do; our clients expect it and we should expect it from ourselves. We’re in a subjective business, where it’s easy to feel that the creative decisions we make are permanently being judged. By reminding ourselves that none of it is personal, we’re able to take a step back and engage more meaningfully and effectively with the task in hand. And through this approach, we’re able to listen and learn.

Clients come to us for our expertise, but we can also learn from them and their experiences. By listening – which, let’s be honest, architects and designers sometimes find hard to do! – we can draw on our clients’ knowledge while adding value through our creative problem-solving. Which ultimately lays the foundations for powerful collaboration. We’re not arrogant, which means we can collaborate in ways that are honest and impactful. Of course, if we believe in something we’ll push for it, and clients tend to trust those instincts and that passion. But overall, flexibility and collaboration for me are absolutely essential. 

First, our cross-sector experience means we can draw on influences and ideas from across the board – for example, enriching retail design schemes with hospitality concepts and experiences. We’re also ​‘well-travelled’ as a team, which promotes patience, understanding and respect when it comes to different cultures. Working where we do, it’s really important to understand the different behaviours and beliefs that might shape a client’s approach to a particular project or challenge. Respecting cultural differences enables progress, because our solutions become uniquely tailored to the context in which a project brief has been defined. 

Our ability to work with different departments within Benoy is another USP. Our sister commercial consulting company Pragma, for instance, often feeds into the front-end of the process, scrutinising briefs from a strategic and commercial viability perspective. We’re also working a lot more closely with the Benoy Branded Environments team, leveraging their graphics and wayfinding expertise to enhance the interior design process. These internal, interdisciplinary collaborations allow us to tie concepts closer together and take a more holistic approach. 

Within Benoy Interiors, we’ve also increased our tech capabilities, with team members now fully immersed in BIM, Revit and Rhino software. It’s a bit of a brave new world for Interior Designers, but we’ve got to grips with these innovations and we’re starting to understand the advantages. 

I’m particularly proud of the work we’ve done for Mercedes F1 team, where we designed a new mobile motorhome interior for the team. That was a great project to work on. Likewise, I was really pleased with our design work for the Red Sea Airport in Saudi Arabia, which will open this year. We’ve also been doing some interesting branded-retail projects in KSA and India, a new food concept development in Dubai and a shopping mall extension in Prague. There’s also a big project in KSA to be released soon that has consumed all our disciplines for the past two years. It’s been a busy and exciting time for the team, and we’re now starting to deliver some of the work that’s been on the drawing board. 

I think we’ll continue to see opportunities opening up in travel and tourism. People want to travel again, and people want unique retail, hospitality and leisure experiences in the locations they visit. So, the appetite for engaging and immersive interiors looks sets to increase across those sectors, as well as in the aviation environments that will support the travel boom. 

We expect to see more momentum in markets like India, while the Middle East will continue its remarkable upward trajectory. Riyadh today in someways reminds me of Shanghai in 2001 when the Chinese property market was on the rise – only a bit dustier, and with more complex traffic issues! The volume of building work, the scale and pace of development, certainly feels comparable. 

To meet these opportunities, we’ll continue to grow our team and sector specialisms and nurture those client relationships. And we’ll make sure we have some fun while we’re doing it.