Emirati designer exhibition showcases 24 emerging local creatives
This year's UAE Designer Exhibition at Dubai Design Week features a glass coffee table debossed with oysters and a towering wooden lamp referencing French pastries.
The exhibition is a regular fixture of Dubai's annual furniture fair, Downtown Design, created to platform emerging talent from across the United Arab Emirates.
Among this year's 24 participants is Jordanian designer Dania Najee, who is presenting a coffee table topped with delicately textured glass that was debossed using real oyster shells.
"It pays tribute to the maritime activities in the UAE," Najee told Dezeen, nodding to Dubai's origins as a pearling and fishing village.
"These things were a significant part of the region's development before the discovery of oil."
Najee used bent laminated timber to create arched wooden legs for the table, paying homage to the curved fishing boats, or shasha, that local fishermen would painstakingly craft from palm fronds.
"Back in the day, they would soak fronds in water for 20 days, just to get a bit of bend," explained Najee.
Also on display is Lebanese designer Nourhan Rahhal's Mille Feuille collection. It features two tables and a lamp formed from stacks of ash wood and terracotta tiles, hand-layered to look like the titular French dessert made of pastry and cream.
Rahhal chose ash for its "busy grain", emulating the flakiness of pastry, while the terracotta was glazed to give it a creamy sheen.
The towering floor lamp features a subtle magnetic switch, which illuminates the piles of wood and terracotta with a soft glow.
"It's dessert meets furniture," explained Rahhal, who wanted to create something in honour of her mother's favourite sweet treat. "What's not to like?" she joked.
Rahhal, who is based in Abu Dhabi, also emphasised the benefits of living and working in the capital's emerging creative scene.
"It's calmer than Dubai," she considered. "There are some younger designers, but I'm hoping that we start to see more and more emerging designers and fabricators."
Syrian architect Ahmad Alkattan is another of the show's exhibitors, presenting a trio of yellow pinewood coffee tables called Tria, Hexa and Pytha, based on "fundamental geometry".
"All of the pieces are based on very simple shapes," the architect told Dezeen.
Although the tables look to be carved from whole blocks of timber, Alkattan actually cut and joined individual pieces of wood to create the geometric pieces to reduce the amount of offcuts.
The architect sources all of his timber from nearby India, Iran or Pakistan to eliminate unnecessary transport emissions.
The rest of the exhibition's projects are made from a diverse array of materials that nod to the UAE's meandering history.
Among the group are Emirati designer Majid Al Bastaki's decorative tables, informed by the region's 1980s steel front doors, and Lebanese designer Ranim AlHalaky's tall room dividers crafted from palm fronds.
Palestinian-Jordanian designer Mohammed Samara collaborated with Emirati designer Khaled Al Shaer to create the Moza chair, a striking piece of low-slung furniture crafted from a tubular steel frame that looks like a planetary orbit.
The annual show is a chance for emerging designers based in the UAE to present their projects to a global audience.
In 2022, Syrian designer Talin Hazbar made a splash with her blocky seating crafted from fishing ropes and cages extracted from the Persian Gulf, which featured as part of the Downtown Design exhibition.
The project went on to be picked up by the curators of last year's inaugural Design Doha biennial and featured in the event's extensive Arab Design Now presentation of contemporary regional design.
Dubai Design Week 2025 takes place from 4 to 9 November 2025 at various locations across Dubai, United Arab Emirates. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
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