A large private office in the UAE, across four zones: meeting rooms, common areas, and a management lounge and office. The client asked for a warm, modern and colourful workplace, functional at the scale of a large floor and welcoming to guests rather than rigid.
The design direction was set by the client’s own interior designer. Our job was to furnish that direction, not to reinterpret it, so for each zone we put forward alternatives that sat inside it and the designer selected most of the specification from what we proposed. Furniture that reads as playful still has to survive a working office, so every option we offered was one we would stand behind for daily use.
The specification came from Fantoni, Sancal, Quinti and True Design, chosen for craftsmanship, modern design, and build quality that holds up in a heavily used office. It gives the office an aesthetic that corporate interiors rarely carry, without giving up durability in the zones that take the most traffic.
The hardest part of this project was not the specification, it was moving the goods into the UAE. With the Strait of Hormuz closed to routine commercial traffic, sea freight into the Gulf was being rerouted and delayed, which made transport the main risk to the installation date. We managed the movement ourselves and completed the installation on site.
The office now works the way the client asked for it: informal enough that guests are comfortable in it, and robust enough for the people using it every day.
