Dubai, UAE · in design
Three venues inside a five-star Dubai hotel — a restaurant, a cafe and a rooftop lounge — designed as one project. The restaurant is the heart of it: an existing bohemian cafe-lounge in rattan and hanging greenery, taken back to its shell and rebuilt as a low, lantern-lit dining room in crimson velvet, fluted walnut and painted murals. The first five images are the room as we found it, so the rest can be read against something real. The cafe answers it in a lighter register of green, marble and checkerboard stone, and the rooftop opens the whole thing out to the skyline: pool, grill, sunken banquettes and terraces that run from afternoon through to late evening.
Two parts of the brief were explored as a choice rather than a single answer. The dining room appears three times under three pendant schemes, smoked glass, layered paper and drawn tube, and the rooftop is shown as two options, the second grouped at the end. Everything between them is one consistent scheme.
The restaurant runs dark and warm: near-black walnut, fluted and flat panelled, with crimson velvet on the loose chairs and banquettes and a black satin-weave alongside it. Light does most of the work: perforated brass lanterns clustered at varying heights, concealed warm recesses in the joinery, candles at table level. The murals are treated as one continuous painting read obliquely from each view, not as separate framed pieces. The cafe inverts the palette into sage green, veined marble and checkerboard stone under brass. On the rooftop the materials go outdoors: timber decking and pergolas, deep red upholstery that carries the restaurant’s note into the open air, dense planting as the room divider, and light set low so the skyline stays the brightest thing in view.
Joinery, wardrobes and upholstered furniture are produced in Arkenstone’s own 10,000 sq. ft. Dubai atelier, with no outsourcing. See inside the atelier.
