Edése Doret: Inside the Mind-Boggling World of Private Jet Design

Nice ride: Edése Doret shows off one of his design projects. All images courtesy of Edése Doret.

There’s private jets, and then there’s what Edése Doret designs — the largest planes in the world, such as 747s, A340s, the A380. Clients are well-heeled patrons, including heads of state. “They want whatever they have in their homes, in their planes,” he says. A hot tub, heated marble floors, and a “living wall” of plants are just a few of the requests. To date, the nine-person Doret Industrial Design, Inc. has designed 42 aircraft interiors. 

Born in Haiti, Doret moved to the Bronx with his family at the age of three to escape the political climate. He grew up in Upper Manhattan (where he currently resides), attended the High School of Art and Design on East 57th Street, and studied industrial design at the Pratt Institute. A chance meeting with a caterer at an aviation trade-show led to his first big corporate plane project. (The caterer had been put in charge of finding the jet designer, obviously.) 

Here, Doret takes us inside the mind-boggling world of private jet interior design, discusses why he always starts each project by sketching, and shares how he is designing beyond traditional aircrafts. Hint: It involves flying hospitals.

The size of the planes means Doret’s clients can request living rooms in the sky. Plus, Forest Gump!

What’s the biggest difference between designing the interior of a home versus a jet?

If I’m designing my apartment, there are no regulations. With aircrafts, there are many regulations outlined by the FAA under Federal Aviation Regulations Far 25 for Aircraft Cabin depending whether it is Private Part 91, Charter Part 135 and Commercial Part 121. On a commercial passenger plane, you have to be a certain distance from the emergency exit and you can’t use materials that are highly flammable. But on a private plane, you could actually block off an exit over the wing. Depending on the number of passengers, you could also use materials, like certain woods, that are more flammable. You just have to adhere to the amount of time you would need to escape an aircraft fire, basically. On a jet, everything is bolted down. It’s not even safe to have a flower vase on the credenza, so they are either stowed or screwed to the table in case of heavy turbulence.

You’re always designing within constraints. Tell us about a time when you pushed back on them and created something completely new?

We had a client who wanted marble in their plane, but the challenge with marble is that it’s too heavy for a plane. As we thought about what we could do, we came up with the idea to shave the marble down to three millimeters, so we could have the marble surface that everyone sees while adhering to the weight requirements of a jet. We’ve been able to use that on both floors and cabinets.

Speaking of marble in the design, you submitted a proposal for Air Force One after President Obama was elected. What feedback did you get on it?

The biggest feedback was that Mrs. Obama didn’t like all the marble on the floor because she walks around barefoot. But we told her we were going to heat the floor under the marble.

Not sure what is harder to fathom, the scale of this plane bedroom or that is has a living wall of plants.

You’ve been asked to design a hot tub for a plane. Where do you even start with something like that? 

I looked at the hot tub like a shower. If you can have water in the shower, you could create a tub. We talked with engineers and learned that the hot tub would have to have an automatic drain, so the water would drain during heavy turbulence and when the landing gear goes down. That was something we hadn’t thought of. But the biggest challenge of designing the hot tub was finding a nice TV to go in it. The hot tub was never added to the plane, but I hear it might come back at some point. 

Has there ever been a client request that just wasn’t feasible?

No, our clients pretty much know what is possible. No one has ever asked for anything crazy like a fireplace.

What is it about your skills and capabilities that set you apart?

I can offer an A-to-Z package, from drawing the initial concepts to finalizing the engineering blueprints. I can create documents that people can build an entire interior from and most designers can’t do that.

All of these big ideas start with you sketching out your ideas. Why start with sketches?

I can design better with a sketch because sometimes you miss things during a 2D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) drawing that you’ll see in a sketch. With a sketch, you get the nuances of the design. I’ll give you an example. I recently designed a curved, winged seat that was very difficult. I could visualize it, myself, but I had a hard time drawing it out in a CAD drawing. I spent a whole day trying to get one wing for the seat done and then translate that for the 3D artist.

I kept doing sketch after sketch after sketch, trying to figure out this seat. My 2D CAD drawing didn’t relay what I wanted, but, through the sketching process, the 3D artist was able to understand what I was doing. In the end, I ended up slicing the seat back and presenting one layer after another to show him what I wanted. He could then map out the seat dimensionally.

In the old days, I would have taken clay or RenShape Foam to sculpt it to make a model and show how it could be done. That is what we learned in school, to be sculptors for seats, cabinets, and tables. But I didn’t have any clay.

Even Doret’s most intricate designs begin with sketches and they can end up as the interior of this new Boeing Business Jet.

How did you break into the industry? 

When I first started, I didn’t have many contacts, so I would take my portfolio to the aviation trade-shows, introduce myself to people, and try to show them my portfolio. My first break came at a show in Orlando in 2004. I got a cheap room at a bad motel, and I would walk from my hotel to the official event hotel and hitch a ride on the event bus that picked people up from there. (When I saw a cockroach in the bathroom one night, I thought, I can never stay at this type of place again.)

At the show, I met the caterer for the planes owned by an international oil and gas company, and he said the company was looking for someone to redesign their MD11 that flew employees from Houston to Angola. And the caterer was tasked with finding the designer! He chose me for the job. The company was happy with my first project, so they then hired me to update two of their 747s. That work connected me with governments and ultimately led to working designing head of state planes.

What is one important principle you learned in your industrial design studies that you use in your work today?

I use a lot of math during the engineering phase, especially in terms of whether the interior space is symmetrical or asymmetrical. There has to be a balance and flow in the cabin. So I will calculate the footprint of a cabinet to a chair to the empty space. We look for a theoretical 36 inches in every direction, and we use that bubble for every person to map out the floor so everyone can navigate the cabin.

Doret is passionate about his latest project to convert an A380 into a flying hospital.

What project are you working now on that is most redefining air travel?

The thing I’m most excited about is designing flying hospitals for humanitarian work. We are going to take an A380 and turn it into a flying hospital that can be quickly deployed to disaster areas. We will design the main deck to have the operating, examination, and recovery rooms and the upper deck will be a seating area for the medical staff. I've been talking to engineers and doctors in New York on the types of equipment we will need. We’ll modify the aircraft, so there will be an elevator that goes from the main deck of the plane to the tarmac to load patients who are in stretchers because the plane is so high off the ground. I know it’s possible because I designed the same kind of elevator for a head of state. This will be like the medical room on Air Force One on steroids.

If you’d like to read more from The Creative Factor, check out Morten Bonde’s story about working as a LEGO Art Director while losing his sight and how the first family of micro-mobility is redesigning the city car in Switzerland.