Paper interior design, the dream that still hasn’t come true.

Anniversaries usually call for highlight reels. Two years ago, Elementa Interior Design opened its doors, and the natural instinct for a milestone like this would be to walk you through our picture-perfect completed interiors the polished floors, the layered lighting, the rooms photographed at golden hour. But this time, we’re doing something different.

For our second anniversary, we’re standing still. And we’re opening the drawer that most design studios keep closed: our never-published work.

Every studio has this drawer. It holds the concepts that stopped at schematic stage, the pitches that went quiet, the visions that were loved but never poured in concrete. For us as designers, this work is some of the most interesting we do because it’s where we get to work purely with dreams and desires, unconstrained by the compromises that construction inevitably brings. These projects were never built. Or perhaps more accurately: not yet.

They vary from hotel concepts to boutique wellness hotspots, and each one taught us something we carried into the projects that did get built. Because in our opinion, design is never finished — it simply waits for its moment.

Read on for our never-published work, and discover how Elementa is building a legacy in the making.

Project 1: Social wellness club — Jumeirah, Dubai

A while back, we were asked to develop the concept and schematic stage for a new social wellness destination in Jumeirah. The moment the enquiry came in, we were excited this was exactly the kind of brief a design studio dreams about and we started right away.

The concept seeks to harness the power of nature and biophilia to enhance mental, emotional, and physical health. In a city that moves as fast as Dubai, we wanted to create a place that asks its members to slow down. The vision rested on three pillars.

Enhance well-being. Beyond the architecture itself, the concept builds in programming — activities and rituals that encourage genuine engagement with nature, designed to rejuvenate the mind, body, and spirit. The spaces were shaped around these moments: rooms that breathe, corners that invite stillness, thresholds that mark the transition from the city outside to the sanctuary within.

Foster community. Wellness, we believe, is not a solitary pursuit. Inspired by natural community structures and the proven benefits of shared experiences in nature, we created environments that encourage social interaction and a sense of belonging — a club in the truest sense of the word, where connection is part of the cure.

This project remains, for now, on paper. And perhaps that’s fitting some ideas arrive before their moment does. The drawings are complete, the vision is fully formed, and it sits quietly in our archive like a seed waiting for the right season. We have no doubt that the thinking behind it nature, well-being, community will find its way into the world, whether through this project or the ones it has already inspired within our studio. It’s one for the books.

Project 2: Fashion hub — Festival City, Dubai

We were invited to pitch for a project unlike anything we had worked on before: a fashion hub near Festival City, Dubai. The brief itself was fascinating, a contemporary building designed to live intensely, occupied for only half of each year, with a total lifespan of three years. Temporary architecture with permanent ambition.

Our aim was to create the ultimate fashion destination. But what truly sets this Fashion Hub apart is something beyond retail. The venue was designed not only to meet needs and necessities, but to foster a lifestyle of timeless elegance, blending a warm, inviting ambiance with the charm of the latest fashion, and offering a truly exclusive experience to everyone who steps inside.

The technical brief was as precise as the vision was ambitious: a double-storey structure of 30 by 21 metres, with generous 3.8-metre folding door openings, fully AC-regulated with calculated heat loads, and a weather-resistant envelope built to perform through Dubai’s climate for its three-year duration.

Within that envelope, we composed a world. A photoshoot area and a fashion exhibition space form the creative heart. A co-working space and incubator gives emerging designers a home because a fashion destination should grow talent, not just display it. A central courtyard brings light and air into the plan, while the main stage and catwalk transform the building into a living venue, ready for shows, launches, and the moments the fashion world lives for. Public amenities complete the picture, ensuring the hub works as beautifully as it looks.

This project reached conceptual stage, and whether it will be built remains an open question. But it stretched us as a studio designing for temporality, for spectacle, for a building that must be unforgettable precisely because it won’t be there forever. That thinking now lives in everything we do.

A Legacy in the making

That’s our motto for the year ahead: a legacy in the making.

The unbuilt work you’ve just read about isn’t a list of regrets it’s proof of range, of ambition, and of a studio that treats every brief, built or not, as an opportunity to push its thinking further. Those drawings shaped who we are today, two years in.

And the momentum is real. With new projects signed at Downtown Dubai, and multiple new-build opportunities taking shape both in Dubai and overseas, we look at the year ahead with genuine contentment and no small amount of excitement. There are things on our drawing boards right now that we can’t wait to share. More about those in our next articles.

Two years down. A legacy in the making.

Elementa Interior Design
Dubai | Abu Dhabi | GCC
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Elementa Interior Design
Dubai, UAE
+971 4 610 2504
+971 58 570 2305
www.elementainterior.com
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