Winding down

Ken Laidler has been a constant, committed, often controversial member of Dubai’s design community.

Here, he talks candidly to Selina Denman about his plans to take a significant step back.

After four years as the face of APID, and over three decades at the helm of his own design firm, Kenneth Laidler has decided to take a step back from both roles. Having begun his career on a building site at the age of 14, Laidler is ready to focus on other pursuits, he explained recently in an exclusive interview with Commercial Interior Design.

APID’s hosting of the IFI General Assembly and Design Congress last month seems like a fitting send off for Laidler, who is handing over presidency of the association to Farida Abdulla Kamber. The event was an apt manifestation of Laidler’s typically ambitious, sometimes seemingly over-reaching, attitude. While he will readily admit that he might not be everyone’s ‘cup of tea’, Laidler has remained committed to changing perceptions of the interior design profession and, as president of APID and a driving force in its initial foundation, has dedicated a significant amount of time and energy into furthering the cause of interior designers in this region. For this, the industry can only be thankful.

CID caught up with Laidler to find out more about his plans for the future.

You’ve decided to take a step back from the mainstay of the business. Why now?

Many people have said that 60 is too young to retire, but not many people started working when they were 14. I was working on a building site by the time I was 15 and didn’t even go to university until I was 21.

Basically, I haven’t had any time off since the age of 14. And I feel like there’s so many things that I would like to have done – and now I’m making the time to do them. It scares me when I hear of people dying in their 60s, before they’ve achieved anything. I think: ‘No, there’s so much more that I want to do’.

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FEATURED COMMENT hi ken what you up to. just thought we would look you up on tinternet.   1 Comments Read more comments »

It changes. I remember somebody once saying that you should know what you want to do by the time you are 25. Here I am at 60 and I still don’t know!

For example, if you had asked me a year ago if I would consider buying a yacht, it hadn’t even occurred to me, until I walked onto one and thought, ‘This could be a wonderful way to spend your time; I could write and I could sketch and draw, and I could see places’.

But I can’t actually ever see myself retiring completely. I’d be bored out of my mind after the first ten minutes. It’s not a simple case of retirement – its just a change of direction in my career.

There are so many interesting things to do in life. I’m not saying that I don’t love design. I really do. The problem is that everybody is a design critic or a design expert now. Before you can even finish what you are trying to achieve, someone is already commenting on it. If they’d only let you finish what you are designing, then they’d appreciate the whole picture.

I guess it’s because not many people, apart from designers, can see the whole picture. They cannot visualise it. That’s why designers are designers, whether they are interior designers or architects or fashion designers – they can visualise the whole thing in their head, for clients that can’t.

You’ve been doing this a long time. Has the average client changed? Become more demanding, for example?

It’s changed, probably because clients travel a lot now and see more of what is happening worldwide.

It means their perceptions are already formed. But if they want you to copy what they have already seen in Chicago or Singapore, what’s the point of hiring a designer?

The other thing is that everybody, from hotel operators to chefs and everybody in between, seems to be an expert in interior design. When you’ve got the CEO of a telephone company telling you that a certain office layout won’t work, even thought he may be brilliantly experienced in mobile telephones, what actually does he know about interior design layout?

If he says, ‘I don’t want my office there because it has no view’, I can understand it, but when they make sweeping comments like ‘it won’t work’, what gives them that in-depth knowledge?

And if they have that knowledge of everything, then interior designers, architects, surgeons, lawyers and accountants might as well stop working and let the CEOs take over!

Frankly, I wouldn’t presume to tell the head of a telecommunications company how to market his latest mobile phone, so what gives him the right to tell an interior designer with 30 years experience that what they are doing is wrong?

This is what frustrates me, because everybody now seems to think they are an expert in interior design, when actually all they have is a lot more exposure to interior decoration, and that’s not the same thing. Until we can get people to recognise the difference, we will continue to suffer these frustrations.