At the high end

Malak studied in the US and started his career doing residential and retail work.
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It’s interesting because I’ve been put into that niche. I would love to do more hospitality work.

That really attracts me. I find that a lot of my corporate work, because it is always very high end, ends up leaning towards the hospitality look. That’s why I would love to get into hospitality a bit more. But yes, for now we mainly concentrate on high-end, governmental corporate work.

Are there inherent challenges when you are working with government entities? How modern are they in their approach to design?

I think things are changing. Maybe because I have done work for some of the most important entities in Dubai, and those are the places where most of the big decisions are made. Important people end up visiting those offices and when they see them, they think: “This is interesting, and it’s very different to our office space. Why can’t our office look like that?”

What are you working on now?

I am doing another corporate office. This one is in Emirates Towers and it’s for the ministry of state. Because we are a small firm, we tend to – depending on the market, of course – work on two or maybe three projects at a time. We don’t like to spread ourselves too thinly.

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I personally believe that there are spaces that, without you knowing it, make you feel good. And I think in a working environment, which is where you are spending the majority of your day and your life, it is really important to focus on that.

It’s like your home. Your home should be an important part of your life and so should your office.

It’s funny how you find a lot of people focusing on the things that they spend the least amount of time in, like their cars – but their homes and offices are not necessarily important. That’s ironic.

You’ll find somebody willing to spend AED 700,000 on their car but not willing to spend AED 30,000 on a sofa. And I think, wait a second, how many hours a day do you spend in your car, and how many hours do you spent sitting on that sofa?

I think that the most important thing about an office is that it makes you feel comfortable. And how do you make someone feel comfortable? You give them the right chair, you give them the right desk, you make sure that the material of the desk makes sense. Light it well, and use materials that are comfortable and relaxing to the eye. It’s not about shock value or something that looks amazing for five minutes but then gives you a headache.

How do you define good design?

First of all, good design doesn’t need to be expensive design. And bad design is not always cheap.

You can spend a lot of money on bad design. And you can spend very little money on great design.

It’s about having the right client who is willing to see the design through and who trusts their designer. That’s very important. You have to have a good client and a good designer. One of the two is not enough.