By Phil Scullion Follow philscullion
Remember Gabrielle Omar from The Apprentice?
You might recall Gabrielle being rather smiley, big on design and project manager in the very first week of the show.
Anyway, she’s an architect, an architect on a mission.
Since leaving series eight of the BBC show in week ten (after a lucky escape in the first episode!) she has been working hard at a couple of businesses, most notably architecture practice Lolli & Square and design agency WeBe3.
The plan is to rebrand architecture, doing for the profession what Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver did for food and cookery.
No pressure then.
We caught up with her for a quick chat on architecture, Lords Sugar’s pad and Nick Hewer’s nose.
Read on…
Hi Gabrielle… we loved you on the Apprentice, but what’s this about becoming the Jamie Oliver of architecture?
After the Apprentice I came out with the whole idea of rebranding architecture, because no-one seems to know what we do!
I commissioned a survey that showed a lot of people don’t realise we have anything to do with the planning process, or that we design buildings, which is quite shocking.
So I think there’s a role there in educating the public about architecture.
My company Lolli & Square do a lot of high end residential interiors and concept designs for rather larger projects, we initially started out in Libya but we’ve now gone over to Egypt as well.
And how about design work – are you busy with that too?
We’ve got a lot of high end residential with bigger budgets, before the Apprentice I was struggling to do the average loft conversion.
Clients don’t come to you; you really have to go to clients. Luckily the publicity from the show has helped.
I’m going to be at 100% Design next month, I’m one of the speakers on the main stage. I’m also doing ‘ask the architect’ so people can come down and ask me anything, from loft conversions to larger buildings, just any advice really!
So what’s your architectural style? What do you like?
It’s a tough one, because we’re in the creative industry fashions tend to change and our opinions tend to change. If you’d asked me six months ago I would have said I’m really into vintage old cottage look which a lot of my clients really wanted.
But at the moment our style has gone to ultra modern, quite slick and clean, sharp edges. It really depends on the clients.
Just like the fashion industry our opinions as architects change, which is a good thing because if you stick with just one style you are left behind, you have to move with the times and with the clients.
How about Lord Sugar’s place? Did you get a sneaky peek?
Haha! Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to get into Lord Sugar’s house. I know he is a property developer though, quite high end interiors. I’ve never seen his house sadly; I’d love to say I had.
At the moment I’m helping Ricky [Martin] who won the Apprentice. Helping him to come up with all his branding, all his logos. Marketing stuff and whatever else, so there’s still a chance I’ll get an invite to go to Lord Sugar’s!
What was the process of the show like?
The filming is in December and then it’s just like a waiting game up until March, you can’t actually tell anyone. That included my mother, she had no idea that I was in it until it came out in the Radio Times.
I remember the night it came out all the candidates were on the phone to each other going “midnight, midnight, we’re going to be in the Radio Times!” and going “this is crazy”.
It is quite crazy being on the Apprentice because you can’t go somewhere without people tweeting where you’ve just been. I was one of the candidates that people loved to hug. I constantly got people coming over!
It’s such a strange experience that no-one else understands, so we meet up a lot and help each other out with our various skills.
You lost as project manager on the t-shirt printing task in the first week – it must have been a scary moment when it looked like you might be going home?
Setting up a printing shop was on my CV, so even though I’d never done T-shirt printing I thought that if we lost then Lord Sugar would say “Gabby, why didn’t you put yourself up”?
I realised I had no choice! When we did lose I was thinking I’m going in the first week, kill me now.
Luckily he saw the stuff that I did do!
Was the whole experience pretty tiring?
It is such a long process. I was in the house two months, a week less than the finalists. It was knackering and by the time you get to the end you’re exhausted.
You get a day off every one or two weeks and even then you’re still doing stuff.
It’s very confined; we weren’t allowed to watch the news!
We were only allowed to have one ten minute phone conversation with our loved ones, which was listened to by production every week.
It was quite intense and when you come out everything is very weird. Great process though and I’m so glad I did it.
So how does that mad rush for the telephone in the morning work? Surely you know when Lord Sugar is going to call?
What happens is that the phone rings anytime between four and six AM. In the first week or so I was caught in bed just waking up with a camera crew over me!
What we all started doing was putting our alarms on for four o’clock, getting changed and then going back to bed and waiting for the phone to go off, just because we didn’t want to be caught in our PJs running down the stairs.
Sometimes the phone didn’t even go off; sometimes you’d be up from four thinking… now? Now? Now?
Would we be right in thinking that you did a lot of lounging around the house and played a lot of ping-pong?
I’d love to say that was the case but because we left the house so early every morning and got home between eight and midnight that house is literally for us just to sleep in, we’re not there long enough!
Those times we were playing ping-pong or having a good swim it’s probably because we only had half an hour to ourselves… and they still kept it on camera.
But yeah the house is pretty awesome, it’s just a shame we didn’t get to enjoy it a bit more I guess!
Is it off putting when Lord Sugar’s helper Nick Hewer wrinkles up his nose?
That can be the most off putting thing in the world.
You sort of know what you’re talking about but you can also have no idea because you’ve only been given a task early on in the morning and you’ve got to know all about the industry by two o’clock in the afternoon.
Then all you can see in the corner of your eye is Nick doing those faces and you kind of want to stop and say “what bit did I say that was wrong?”
In that first week everyone had that point where they just collapsed and said “I have no idea what to say now”.
By the end of the process we didn’t even look at Nick. Only: “good morning Nick” and then “goodnight Nick, take care”.
Hours between, just don’t look at him.
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JMGS