A place for everything and everything in its place (Mix Interiors)
James Melia on white walls, clear desks and why you will never catch him ‘styling’ anything.
The first thing James Melia did when setting up design consultancy, BLOND, from his bedroom is 2015 was to paint the whole room white, including the floor. ‘I’ll never forget it because of the pain of sanding it back to the wood when we sold the house,’ he laughs. He had resigned from a job he loved at PriestmanGoode, taken out a £15,000 loan against his home, and spent months coming up with a company name that he couldn’t remember the morning after pinning it proudly on his fridge. But, as he speaks from a room he has painted grey in a recently refurbished studio in London’s Hackney, it turns out he was on to something with that paint. I ask him how he came up with the name BLOND, after his first choice proved so unmemorable. ‘I was thinking about how art galleries are typically sterile white,’ he says. ‘And how the personality comes from the paintings or installations. Blond is the colour of wood that provides a similarly subtle and unobtrusive backdrop. I wanted the design studio to be a blank canvas and for the work we produced to provide the colour.’ When his first client joked that he expected Melia and his team to show up wearing blond wigs, he knew he had, at least, created a memorable name and, having written his dissertation on the impact of mess on creativity, he operates a clear desk policy to maintain that ‘blank canvas’ feeling to this day.
But the fact that Melia would even have a home to take out a loan against by the time he was in his late 20s was far from inevitable. He had a bumpy start to life with financial insecurity and almost 20 house moves before he came of age; he finished his A-levels while living alone. ‘My mum did an amazing job of raising two kids on her own, but I honestly don’t know how I passed sixth form,’ he reflects. Having struggled with dyslexia throughout school, he had finally found design, technology and graphic design, and was hooked. ‘I was good with my hands and I remember thinking, “This is really cool; I really enjoy this”.’ He wanted to study product design at university, but his mother told him there was no money in it. ’I really wanted to please Mum, so I did a foundation in maths and engineering at Loughborough University’ he says. ‘It was absolutely brutal.’
As unhappy as he was in Loughborough, spending a year away from home built confidence in his own decisions and securing a place at Nottingham Trent University to study furniture and product design set him on a path from which he’s never looked back. ‘I fell in love immediately,’ he says. ‘With the town, the creative scene, the people, my classmates, the work I was doing. Something just clicked and I loved everything about it.’ He become a self-described ‘workaholic,’ pursuing interests such as typography that were beyond the scope of his degree, but fed his passion for design. One lecturer in particular, Leslie Arthur (short-listed by the Times Higher Education Supplement as one of the most innovative in the UK), sparked his imagination. ‘Until then, I had never sat in a lesson and thought, “I want to hear everything you've got to say”,’ says Melia. ‘He was incredibly inspiring and taught me that all design is communication.’
A year in industry followed, during which he worked grindingly long hours for a weekly pay packet that barely covered a tiny flat, above a Vietnamese restaurant, with a permanent leak that the landlord refused to acknowledge. ‘And I loved all of it’, he grins. ‘I loved being part of the design consultancy industry. That time moulded me into who I am.’ He graduated, and spent more time in London design firms, but always knew he would eventually set up his own studio. And 11 years on from that all-white bedroom, his early enthusiasm doesn’t seem to have waned at all. He speaks passionately about his belief that strategy should drive design. ‘Although it’s often what clients initially come to industrial design agencies for, I am allergic to the word styling,’ he says. ‘We don’t even start sketching until at least halfway through the project, because first we have to fundamentally understand the consumer and the problem we can solve for them and then, after some deep thinking, organise our thoughts into a clear set of design guidelines, so that whatever we come up with makes their life more delightful and the world more sustainable. Strategy is the soul of a project; and if you get that part right, the outcome almost designs itself.’ While those outcomes certainly share a certain understated aesthetic, Melia maintains the only ‘red thread’ that runs through BLOND’s work is a commitment to strategy. However he does concede that he’s got no tolerance for the superfluous: ’The most common feedback I give my designers is that they’re trying to do too much in one concept,’ he laughs. ‘I’m always telling them to split one idea out into three different concepts, so each one is crystal clear about what it is trying to communicate.’
I ask Melia what he’s most proud of, expecting him to tell me about an award-winning project or a big-name client—perhaps Fussy deodorant or Joseph Joseph—but the word ‘culture’ is out of his mouth before I can even finish the question. ‘When you start out, you imagine that running a business is about hiring people, paying them and looking after their working hours, but it’s so much more than that,’ he explains. ‘Every single person is different and you have to create a career path for each of them, as well as respecting their time and creating a environment they want to be in, and then structure the company around that. It’s dynamic and constantly evolving, but working out a recipe for how to keep doing that is something I'm really proud of. I even took a short video of the office last week because it just felt so happy and full of people enjoying their work.’
One of the ways in which in which Melia invests in that culture is through Milan Design Week and London Design Festival. With the majority of their work under NDA due to intellectual property restrictions, exhibiting is not as simple as showing their latest projects. And while taking part in design shows is, of course, partly about raising their profile and showing how they work if not what they do, exhibitions such as BLOND Laboratory are also about giving the team opportunities to collaborate and play. ‘It is lovely for them to be involved in something that we’re not doing for money, but for the design community,’ he says. Previous collaborators include Form Us With Love, Pentagram’s Jon Marshall, Julie Richoz and Sony’s Hirotaka Tako.
As we speak, his team of 28 (soon to be 35) is happily working around him in a space that they have recently renovated. The studio, on a quiet Hackney back street, is designed around the different types of work they undertake on any given day, with a clear purpose for every of inch the space. An expanded workshop houses multiple 3D-printing machines that run 24/7, such is the importance of prototyping to the BLOND process. The industrial steel kitchen island around which the team prepare their lunch sits directly underneath an identically sized light box so it can double-up as a photo studio. ‘It’s been designed to take a beating, and yet anything you put on there immediately looks like a professional photo, even if you are using a phone camera,’ says Melia. While the workshop is allowed to get messy, extensive storage throughout the rest of the studio enables his clear desk policy and supports client confidentiality with each project returned to its own box at the end of the day. Melia designed the desks himself, hiding powerful computers in their columns, keeping their surfaces as clear as possible. But most importantly, the studio is designed to foster connection and collaboration. ‘There are lots of online tools now, but we wanted a specific collaboration space for ideation, so we can come together and have conversations about the work,’ he says. And there is that understated design aesthetic again: a blank canvas comprising a pared back, industrial material palette, art-gallery grey in addition to the original white, and a place for everything and everything in its place.
From humble beginnings, Melia’s passion for design and care for people has brought him all the way to this purpose-build studio surrounded by a dedicated team who want to come in to work every day. ‘I feel very lucky that I chose the right profession,’ he says. ‘We celebrated 10 years last year and I’m proud that we made it to that milestone and that our clients value our opinions. Now, we just have to keep working hard to ensure that we still deserve to be heard.’
All copy is reproduced here as it was supplied by Katie Treggiden to the client or publication.
Katie Treggiden is a craft, design and sustainability writer, a nature facilitator and the author of Broken: Mending and Repair in a Throwaway World (Ludion, 2023).
