Commercial Interior Design

Welcoming Maison Yoca to Dubai’s thriving design community ✨🇦🇪

As Maison Yoca (.yoca) enters the Middle East market with a new studio in Dubai, we caught up with architect and creative director Sarah Najmi Bilgrami () who founded the multi-award-winning luxury design house alongside Syed Zayd Bilgrami.

For Sarah, art and architecture have always been intrinsic to her upbringing, and her path towards a design career has been shaped by both pinch-me, award-winning milestones and quiet moments of observation, exploration, and discovery through travel – each contributing to a natural design instinct.

“I was always made aware that a designer’s role runs far deeper than the selection of tapestry or the placement of art,” shares Bilgrami.

“It is a meticulous curation of the thoughtful integration of a visual language into the fabric of someone’s life. My greatest ongoing inspiration remains the people I design for. Understanding them fully, and then carefully, honestly, educating them in the fundamentals of a design language that serves who they are – that is the work that matters most to me.”

An inspiring ethos that shapes much of the work in our region, an exciting moment to celebrate.




Images courtesy of

Rethinking how we build

There is a persistent myth in architecture that sustainability and beauty are in tension – that designing responsibly means making sacrifices in experience, material quality, or spatial ambition. In practice, the opposite is true. The most enduring buildings we admire are invariably those that were designed with care, with restraint, and with a clear sense of what they were for. Longevity and quality are not in conflict. They are the same thing.

🖋️ Writing for CID, Khaled Al Shamaa, director and co-founder of XYZ Designers () explores how architectural beauty and sustainability can evolve together – creating a more enduring, relevant built environment in the Gulf.

You can read the full post on CID.

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