BEN KELLY
“Ben Kelly rescued the colour orange from the scrap heap of style.”
The World of Interiors, Nov 1984. James Kirklington
“Language of materials which eventually became like my handwriting and recognisable as my work. With each project, you add another piece.”
Ben Kelly, Nov 2023
Where did you grow up, and what led you to become an interior designer?
Ben. I grew up in a small village called Appletreewick, in the North Yorkshire Dales. We lived in an old stone-built lead miner’s cottage. Back then, Appletreewick had two pubs, a church and 27 houses. I had an idyllic childhood; the local primary school had 11 children in total. The village was a combination of farmers and their families and some unusual eccentrics, mostly ladies. Everybody knew each other. Mum was friendly with lots of the ladies, and I found myself in some of their houses in my early teens. Many had glossy magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Queen. I used to look through them and see this other world, this kind of glossy world. I would see articles about interiors or houses, which must have resonated with me. Because I never quite knew why I ever wanted to do interior design.
Then I went off to Skipton Grammar School. At that time, music was flooding out. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and all the rest were starting up, and that seeped through to Appletreewick via the radio. I’d listen to my transistor radio lying in bed when I was supposed to be asleep. I somehow got hold of the music papers Melody Maker and the New Musical Express (NME), where I could see this massively influential other world.
I was hopeless at school. I saw somebody go off to art school and return, saying it’s fantastic. You can do whatever you want. You can grow your hair long, which was a big thing then. You can wear whatever you like. There are lots of girls, it’s fantastic. That sounded good to me. I had heard
of David Hockney at that time, and he was from Bradford. An art teacher at school encouraged me, so I applied to Bradford Art School. I thought it would be automatic, and of course, they turned me down.
My mother found out there was a course at the art school in Lancaster that did something called Interior Design, which I must have started showing an interest in. Again, I don’t know why Interior Design. I put it down to staring at this cupboard next to the fireplace in our cottage. My mother kept saying it wasn’t practical, as a cupboard, and I saw it as a problem that needed solving. I remember staring at this cupboard for years, and I think that had something to do with it all.
By then, I knew more about the subject and applied to the course in Lancaster; I was provisionally accepted but needed more O-levels. I needed five and left school with three; I had to stay down a year in the fifth form. I passed English in evening classes, which made it four. And I then took A-level ceramics, failed the A-level, and got an O-level. So finally, I scraped together five. I did a Foundation course at Lancaster, which was terrific; it was mind-blowing. It covered every discipline.
I spent four years at Lancaster Art School. By that time, I discovered through magazines that exciting things were happening in the world of interior design. I started on the Interior Design course and then thought I’d be more interested in doing sculpture. But I figured I would never make any money being an artist, and that’s not very practical. I had a young family by this time, so I decided I had to earn a living and stuck with the Interior Design course.
One other person from the college had been accepted to the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. I thought, wow, the Royal College, and that’s in London. So, that became my double ambition. After art college in Lancaster, I spent a year being a house husband. During that year, I put my portfolio together to apply to Royal College. And I got in there, and my life changed dramatically and radically.
Lancaster to London, how did life radically change for you?
Ben. I was asked at the RCA interview why I wanted a further three years of education in interior design. My answer back then was along the lines of wanting to see if it was possible to combine the disciplines of interior design and art practice to produce what I called Art Interiors. As the decades rolled on, I think that maybe I achieved that with some projects.
At the Royal College of Art, I did the postgraduate Interior Design course, and my professor was Hugh Casson, the Director of Architecture for the Festival of Britain in 1951. So that was just incredible. I was there from 1971 to 1974.
At Lancaster in 1966, I had grown my hair long and had developed my art school image. I thought that because Hockney had been at the Royal College, everyone there would have peroxide-blonde hair and be wearing gold lame suits. I was super disappointed. I saw the most boring-looking people imaginable. Well, just regular-looking people.
Within my first week, I wandered down the King’s Road and found this shop called Let It Rock. I walked in and saw this other world, and Vivienne Westwood was there. I picked up a few things, went home and cut all my hair off. I started wearing brothel creepers, fluorescent pink socks, tight black jeans and a little gold belt and built that image up over a period.
“One day, I was in the canteen at the college, and this group of the most amazing-looking people I’d ever seen walked in from the fashion school. They looked like they were from another planet. Some of the girls had shaved their eyebrows. I thought, finally! I just had the best time there.”
I used many of the other college departments’ facilities and really made use of the place; it was fantastic.
It was a period when things were possible. Unlike today’s commercialised King’s Road, it was full of independent shops run by young people back then. There were no chain stores; there were all these pockets of independent people doing extraordinary things in areas which are now unrecognisable.
By then, I had a different girlfriend from the fashion school; she had started selling clothes at a little store way down Fulham Road. Eventually, the people who ran that store decided to open a shop in Covent Garden, which was still the wholesale fruit and veg market. They knew I had done interior design at the RCA and asked me to design their shop, which was called Howie. It was one of the first-ever fashion shops to open in that area; maybe one or two others were tucked away. That was my starting point in 1977.
I’d seen the work of Frank Gehry, the American architect, which was amazing to me. His house was an incredible sculptural thing made from basic building materials: raw sheets of plywood, chain link fencing, and materials that felt out of context. I started picking up on things I saw that looked interesting. The Italian groups Archizoom and Superstudio both had a significant influence.
As a result of the design work on the Howie shop, I met somebody called Peter Saville, who was doing a record sleeve for a band called Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD). He didn’t know what to do with it, and we collaborated on that sleeve, which won many rewards. That led to more album covers and small fashion retail shops, mainly in Convent Garden.
How did The Haçienda (FAC 51) job come about?
Ben. One day, Peter told me that Factory Records had decided to open a club. Joy Division had success with their first album, Unknown Pleasures. Ian Curtis had committed suicide. Joy Division had been to New York and became New Order. They had seen the clubs in Manhattan, so they wanted to open a club like that in Manchester. The long and short of that was that Peter said, ‘There’s no way I could do this, but I know a man who can’.
I got the train to Manchester and met Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus, and New Order’s manager, Rob Gretton. They showed me around this vast space, which was in a real mess. Back at the entrance, they asked if I wanted the job. Of course, I wanted the job! Then, some other people walked in and said, we’d like you to do our album cover. They were the band, A Certain Ratio. So, I got on the train back to London with two design jobs, a nightclub, and an album cover.
At The Haçienda, for practical reasons, I put roadside bollards around the dance floor and cat’s eyes in line with them on the floor to mark a hazard and create a filtering system on and off the dance floor. We painted stripes on diagonal stripes on columns to mark the columns as a hazard because the columns went across the dance floor. Doing those two things became a sort of trademark for me. A whole number of projects since then, I’ve referenced back to that.
So that club was FAC 51 The Haçienda, which, after a few years, the manager thought they needed a bar that opened in the daytime. That became a project called the Dry Bar (FAC 201); Factory finally bought a building we converted into their headquarters. By 1992, Factory Communications Ltd declared bankruptcy, and The Haçienda was closed.
How did your practice and work develop from there?
Ben. By this time, we’d done a bar in Glasgow called Bar 10, which was a great little job. That became a gathering place and watering hole for the entire creative community of Scotland. We had been asked to pitch for a massive piece of work at the Science Museum called The Basement. We were pitching up against some significant architectural practices. I had built up my practice by that time, Ben Kelly Design (BKD). We were making what was the penultimate client presentation; we had been shortlisted. As we came out of that presentation, the Design Director whispered in my ear, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you got this job? You could do a Haçienda for kids”. That was music to my ears, and I was determined to get the job. We worked night and day, and we won that project.
Up to that point, I’d been working for friends or like-minded people: wackos and weirdos! But the museum was a national institution. The Basement was a substantial piece of work, and it’s still there 28 years later, which is just amazing. We built it to last and not to pander to fashion or current tastes. In the early days, the discipline of interior design was kind of frowned upon. Is it decoration? Is it design? And architecture is the top of the tree, where serious work gets done. Interior Design is seen as a lower species. Over the years, I was proud to know that the best architects had respect for the work that we were doing.
At an early point, I became obsessed with the work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp. His concept of the found object and the ready-made hugely appealed to me. Also, Andy Warhol’s work. Those two have stayed with me. I once met Andy Warhol dressed as Andy Warhol at a book signing that he did in London for his book A to B and Back Again.
The art thing is massively important for me. I’ve created big installations at 180 The Strand, been commissioned for other installations, and had exhibitions. That’s what my home studio in the South-East is about; it’s a place to hatch plots.
By the time I got the office going in Stoney Street in Borough Market, London, we had piles of samples of materials, glazed bricks, glazed tiles, coloured glass blocks, things that you wouldn’t usually see in interiors or architecture at the time. When clients would come to meetings, they loved the materials, the touch, the smell, and the texture.
Then there is the use of colour. Early on, all I could find with paint was domestic paint charts, such as Dulux paint. I lived in South Kensington at the time, in a flat opposite the Natural History Museum. I was walking past a massive building site directly opposite the V&A with hoardings around the site. Those hoardings were painted precisely the orange I had in my head; I couldn’t find it on any paint chart. And it was just there, bang. It had this kind of industrial connection, used for practical purposes. They had excavated a gigantic hole where they were putting basements and sub-basements into this new building. At the bottom of the hole was an empty tin of paint. I scrambled down and picked it up. It was made by a company called Trimite, who made industrial paint and got in touch with them. I was sent this beautiful paint chart full of amazing, unusual colours I’d never found before. That felt like another door opened. Orange had a taboo about it, maybe because it had been fashionable in the fifties and sixties.
I designed a hairdressing salon called Smile, which was at the bottom of King’s Road. We used orange in the salon, which was published in the magazine The World of Interiors, to my amazement. The journalist wrote this fantastic piece, which included a line that read, ‘Ben Kelly rescued the colour orange from the scrap heap of style.’ That’s going on my gravestone! Orange has become one of my trademarks; it’s optimistic, it’s positive. Tony Wilson pointed out that orange is like the colour of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. It is pretty different, but over there, they call it International Orange. And I thought I’d have that name.
Have you worked on side projects away from your commissioned work?
Ben. I’ve worked on books, had exhibitions and started to do my own art practice, separate from Ben Kelly Design. I had a show at the Glasgow School of Art in the Mackintosh Gallery. I’ve always done side projects. Two guys who called themselves Morph said they wanted to rebuild The Haçienda digitally. So, I gave them all the drawings, and they spent two or three years doing it. The outcome was two unbelievably high-quality silkscreen prints; there were about 22 screens involved. They were printed by an outfit called Coriander Studio, who did all of Damien Hirst’s early prints and worked for Peter Blake and people like that.
Recently, I’ve been painting, and I’ve been looking at creating more prints. Shortly, we are launching an online web shop to open things up to a broader audience. There will be some prints linked to The Haçienda and lots more stuff separate and beyond that.
When I did the book Haçienda Landscapes as a crowd-funded project via Kickstarter, Anthony Burrill (RyeZine No.2) helped me get that off the ground and introduced me to somebody who would run the campaign. That was just about the most nail-biting thing I’ve ever done; we needed to raise a large amount of crowd-funded money for it to work. Hundreds of people funded the project, which told me that there is this audience out there.
Last month we went to Manchester for the opening of a new building called Factory International. What Factory Records did for the city of Manchester and beyond is almost impossible to quantify. The Tory government gave Manchester City Council 90 million pounds about ten years ago at the beginning of that whole ‘Levelling Up’ thing to use for a new project.
The Manchester International Festival needed a permanent home. And out of that came this idea for a new building. It was felt that it should have some connection back to Factory Records because when The Haçienda opened in a rundown part of Manchester, it is acknowledged that it began the regeneration of Manchester. The same happened with the Dry Bar on Oldham Street.
Eighteen months, maybe as long as two years ago, I got a phone call about that project. They were looking for somebody to design the public-facing interior of the building. I spoke with the architect practice Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which is Rem Koolhaas’s practice. I said I couldn’t possibly do it alone because I had closed my office. I now work either on my own or with freelancers when needed. So, I said I’d like to collaborate with another company, Brinkworth Design, who are friends of mine. One of the outcomes of that project is a 32-meter-long bar. When we designed the Dry Bar in 1989, it had the longest bar in Manchester. Now, we’ve gone even longer!
The Haçienda opened in 1982, and this building opened in 2023. So, what’s amazing for me is that this new project is the opposite bookend to The Haçienda. I’ve carried the language through in a sense. We’ve put a huge red fabric curtain in the building, which is a homage to the original red curtain in the Dry Bar, and have painted stripes on columns. So much has happened, people have passed through, and the historical narrative has longevity.
Ben Kelly’s artwork is available from benkellydesign.co.uk/shop
Ben Kelly
Interior Designer