Ken Giannini

18 December, 2009

It’s been a whirlwind start to Ken Giannini’s new job as joint interior design director at architecture practice Scott Brownrigg.When I catch up with him at the London office he’s still buzzing from a trip to Abu Dhabi where, as any good architect would, he braved the searing heat to ‘walk the city’. ‘It’s fascinating, he says, because until 1960 there was virtually nothing there. They’ve built some awful buildings, but there are some great ones, too.’

Giannini was headhunted by Scott Brownrigg earlier this year after meeting its award-winning interior design director Pernille Stafford, with whom he now jointly leads the interiors and workplace division.

‘It’s been a fantastic start,’ he says. ‘Immediately Pernille and I started working on really trying to grow the interiors group across all the sectors that we work in, whether that’s offices, education or hospitality – and we’re also involved with defence projects for the Ministry of Defence.’

Originally from the USA, Giannini completed his architectural training in London, where he worked for leading practices including Fitch and NBBJ. He became global marketing director at DEGWbefore stepping up to the position of design director after the departure of Stephen Greenberg in 2001. In 2006 he rejoined MCM, the practice he first worked for, nine years earlier.

‘I guess the big difference for me is that, at MCM, where my whole role was business development, I didn’t really get involved with projects or with managing the team,’ he says. ‘With Scott Brownrigg I’m getting back to my roots and that’s great because I am an architect, I design and I like being creative and working with clients.’

The diversity of projects at Scott Brownrigg was also a draw. Giannini has been called an office expert, but there’s more to him than that: ‘I sometimes joke, “How many reception desks can I possibly design in my career?”, so getting involved with projects in education and hospitality as well as office design is really refreshing’.

With the economy the way it is, we’re more used to hearing about redundancies than top-level appointments. ‘I think that’s a great sign that they’ve taken me on’, says Giannini. ‘It really shows that the company means business’.

Despite some encouraging signs, though, Giannini admits that it’s been a bleak time for the interior design industry. ‘The whole market is very flat, let’s face it. There are far fewer projects around and far fewer companies actually committing to move. But there have been a few deals in London recently that have started to indicate that we might be beginning to turn a corner.’

Giannini says he’s seen a rise in refurbishment projects as a result of the economic downturn. ‘There aren’t going to be too many new buildings being developed any time soon’, he says, ‘but there are lot of things we can be doing to make buildings work harder and better, without spending a lot of money.’

So can employers no longer afford great office design? ‘I think office productivity is actually more important now that employers need to maximise profitability without spending too much. There is an argument that employers wishing to get out of this sort of malaise can invest in the office environment to lift the spirits of the people who work there and also make things more efficient. And there’s a big movement towards that at the moment.’

If we are beginning to turn a corner in the commercial sector, though, Giannini believes that the general election will bring an overall drop in public spending. ‘Some companies have changed what they do to take advantage of a relatively strong public sector,’ he says, ‘but, if I were a betting man, I’d say that there’s going to be a significant drop. At Scott Brownrigg we’re lucky to be doing a significant amount of work with the MoD,and don’t think that funding is really going to dry up.’

On the whole, Giannini is optimistic and he’s clearly taken his new company to his heart: ‘We’re looking to be one of the top three or four commercial interior design companies in the UK in a very short period of time’, he says with enthusiasm. And with a team like Stafford and Giannini in charge, it’s more than likely.