Five Minutes With...William Knight

Congratulations on your new role! Tell us a little bit about your journey at Bisley over the last 14 years and what you hope to achieve in your new role as Creative Director?

Thank you! It’s been fascinating seeing Bisley negotiate some extremely complex issues, not only within the furniture market (the key point here being the rapid decline of paper based storage) but also being a part of a manufacturing business that has had to evolve around an increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape. Throw in an unprecedented global pandemic (I won’t mention the C word) as well as Brexit and you might assume we’d be in pretty bad shape. Fortunately, we’ve navigated though all of these trials rather well and are a more rounded and diverse business because of them.

Speaking on my new role broadly I’d say that the key to creative direction is to leave one’s ego at the door. Simply put, my plan is to play to our manufacturing strengths as well as our rich heritage to broaden our product offering. One of the ways of doing this is finding the right people for each specific part of the project and almost acting as mediator to focus everyone in the right direction. I really love working with the people around me and it’s wonderful that we have so many talented people across the business to collaborate with.

What has been your favourite project to work on from concept to completion?

Recently I’d have to say Rabobank. It was a challenging project in that we had to tailor our locker wall product to work in some unusual spaces and suite in with some complex architectural fittings. We worked around the issues, solved the problems and ended up with a beautiful installation.

How do you stay informed about industry trends and developments?

Being in Clerkenwell is undoubtedly very useful for this - the gossip mill is always turning and it’s very hard for anything to be kept a secret. Digitally, there are a few websites I keep up to speed with such as Dezeen and Designboom which cover most of the industry developments. Popular mechanics can also be quite good for reading about developing technology that may trickle down in the future.

What’s one industry trend that you love and one that you dislike?

Currently I’ve seen a lot of colour drenching in sophisticated palettes that gives the illusion of the furniture being more anchored to the interior as well as surrounding pieces. It adds quite a luxurious feel to what could be utilitarian settings.

I’m not a huge fan of reconfigurable/modular or too high a volume of mobile furniture. People are at offices to do their jobs, not to move furniture (and inevitably not put it back).

If you didn’t work in the furniture industry, what do you think you’d be doing?

I love sunglasses and I’ve always wanted to have my own eyewear company. If I suddenly disappear one day that’ll probably be where I’ll be!

Do you have any words of advice for anyone who wants to work in the creative side of furniture design and manufacturing?

I think understanding materials and manufacturing processes is really important. You could design the most beautiful piece of furniture in the world but without understanding how it could be made and at what cost it’s going to be difficult to get it off the paper. Once you understand the process of making the furniture you can the see the inherent beauty that certain processes add to the piece.

What do you get up to in your spare time?

I used to be a musician when I was younger so spend a fair bit of my spare time messing about on my synthesizers or other instruments I’ve got. Apart from that I really love cooking, so I spend a lot of in the kitchen testing recipes and testing them out on my patient family members.