Commercial Interior Design · April 2019
An Urban Oasis: Zabeel House by Jumeirah, The Greens
In short
CID’s April 2019 case study covers Zabeel House by Jumeirah, The Greens, and it is the only document in this archive that names a full LW project team rather than one lead: Rachel Kidd, then an associate, with Susanne Herbeck, Jacqueline Craft and Stefano Ripoli. The design reads a New York-loft language into a Dubai residential community, and the two details the piece dwells on are worth having: bar counters built from reclaimed red brick, and an interactive artwork guests write their favourite Dubai experiences onto.
The projects this piece is about
April 2019 · 9 pages
The work in the piece
Zabeel House
What did the hotel have to do?
Belong to its neighbourhood. CID states the brief directly: the hotel needed to reflect the surrounding areas through art and design, and to give travellers a way into the neighbourhood rather than a way to avoid it. That is why the artwork is participatory rather than decorative.
We incorporated interactive artwork, which allows guests to write down their favourite experiences in Dubai, as well as quirky oversized white ceramic ants, newspaper basset hounds and miniature bicycles, all of which together project the narrative of the hotel.
Rachel Kidd, quoted in Commercial Interior Design, April 2019
Where does the loft language come from?
From materials with a history. The bar counters are built out of reclaimed red brick, and the scheme layers luxury, eclecticism and traditional motifs against that — which is what stops a New York reference in a Dubai suburb reading as pastiche.
What this piece establishes
The printed article
The page above is a summary with attributed extracts, not a reproduction: the copyright in this article belongs to Commercial Interior Design. The scanned pages are served from this site so the printed object stays available to anyone who wants it.
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