Talkin' blues

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Ben Corrigan, partner and senior designer at Bluehaus.

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Design for the Nawas concept mobile stores in Oman.

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Nawas concept mobile store.

As senior design manager and a partner in Bluehaus, Ben Corrigan talks about the value of being organised and the projects that put his company on the creative map in Dubai.

With 10 years of design experience in Dubai, Ben Corrigan has seen the city's interior design market evolve. As the market has grown in strength so has Bluehaus, the company in which he is a partner.

Having started out doing a lot of corporate work, Corrigan is now pushing more for hospitality projects, as well as bringing aspects of hospitality design into the office. He tells CID about some current projects and the work that helped him make his mark.

What is your first memory of being interested in design?

I'm not going to tell you that my first memory of being interested in design was at three years old, because honestly it wasn't. Ironically I didn't do very well at art in school, but I think it was looking at retail and then later on, at bars and clubs, that got me interested in design.

I thought it looked really exciting and something I wanted to be involved in. I actually started off doing graphic design, then fashion design and then went to interiors, after a lecturer at college pushed me into it.

What is your formal training in the interior design field?

I did a course at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art & Design, on the south coast of England. This was followed by post-graduate work and, as with a lot of students, I probably stayed there longer than I needed to.

It was a fantastic course and I really enjoyed it, but I still kind of feel like I fell into it though.

I'm still surprised I'm in interior design, maybe I should have been a project manager instead.

Do you excel at the organisational side of the business?

One of our company's strengths is process. We are a very structured company and design is something I feel shouldn't be hard. A lot of design companies are quite chaotic. [The project] side of the business is almost set up like clockwork, so the designer can get on with the job.

Although I'm a partner in Bluehaus, first and foremost I am a senior designer. We have a general manager who takes care of the management side of things. The whole point is that regardless of what we do, we're still a business.

I like to be very structured and organised. Our clients like that and we believe in designing to build. In the Middle East, where the market is fast moving and competitive, cut-throat almost, you don't have time to mess around with designs that need to be engineered.

Tell us about your first design job...

My first design job in interiors was cosmetic work for a nightclub. One of the things that colleges are getting better at, but weren't particularly good at then, is teaching designers about the reality of business: lessons in budgeting and programming and actually making a design buildable.

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