Hospitality Interiors

Hospitality Interior Design in Dubai

A hospitality interior is judged twice: once by a guest deciding within a few steps whether to stay, and again by an operator counting what the room carries on a full evening. Both verdicts are settled in the plan long before they are settled in the finish. LKYOOB designs and delivers hospitality interiors from its studio in Jumeirah 1, with the engineering held in the same team.

LKYOOB is a multidisciplinary design studio in Jumeirah 1, Dubai, working on hospitality interior design for restaurants, cafes, boutique hotels and private clubs. The service covers the planning of front of house and back of house together, the interior architecture of the space, the coordination of kitchen, cooling, extraction, acoustics and lighting within it, the specification of finishes chosen for commercial wear, and the delivery of the fit-out on site. Interior design sits in one team with architecture design, engineering, landscape design, project management and execution oversight, and the practice is registered with Dubai Municipality in the name KYOOB ENGINEERING CONSULTANCY L.L.C, classified to G+4, so the drawings and the authority documentation come from the same office. Founded by Moosa Swaidan, with design led by Mahra Al Ramlawi, the studio takes hospitality commissions in Dubai and across the United Arab Emirates.

Front of house, back of house, and the line between them

The part of a venue a guest photographs is the smaller half of the problem. Behind it runs a service diagram that decides whether the room works: how a plate travels from pass to table without crossing an arriving guest, where deliveries land and how waste leaves, where staff change and where they stand when the room is quiet, and how extraction and cooling do their work without announcing themselves in the ceiling of the dining room.

Those routes have to be drawn before the finishes are chosen, because they set the plan. A dining room laid out for its look and serviced afterwards produces the faults every operator recognises: a corner nobody wants to sit in, a service station in view of the best table, a kitchen door that swings into a sightline, a room that sounds like a corridor once it is full. None of it is a decorating failure. Each one is a planning decision taken in the wrong order.

Acoustics deserve their own line, because they are the most common complaint about a new venue in Dubai and the most expensive to fix afterwards. Hard stone, glass and exposed structure make a room look composed and sound impossible, and the corrective is absorption designed into ceilings, upholstery and wall build-ups from the start rather than panels added once the reviews arrive. That work belongs in the drawing set, not in a later remedial visit.

What changes between a restaurant, a cafe, a hotel and a club

A restaurant is an operating machine wrapped in a room. The kitchen sets the plan, the service route sets the circulation, and the seating mix decides what the space can actually carry, since a room full of large tables and a room full of small ones are different businesses. Detail is tested at the point of contact: the edge of a table, the height of a banquette back, the light that has to flatter both a face and a plate.

A cafe turns over faster and is read from the street, so the counter, the queue and the first three metres do most of the work. Materials are chosen knowing they will be cleaned several times a day and moved against constantly, and the lighting has to carry a room from a quiet morning to a busy afternoon without being relit.

A boutique hotel adds the guest room, where the discipline shifts to repetition and to sleep: a room type resolved once and built many times, with acoustic separation between rooms and corridors, blackout done properly, and services that can be maintained without opening a finished wall. Public areas answer to arrival and to the way a small lobby has to work as reception, lounge and sometimes bar.

A private club is the closest of the four to residential work, which is where a studio like this one is most at home. The membership is known rather than passing, the rooms are meant to be lived in over years rather than admired for a season, and privacy, discretion and the quality of joinery and stone matter more than turnover. Hospitality standards of service planning still apply underneath it.

Process

Five stages, adapted to an operating business

A hospitality commission follows the same five stages as every other LKYOOB project, with one difference that shapes all of them: the client is running a business, and the design is answerable to how that business works when it is full.

Vision & Lifestyle Study

The study is of the operation rather than a household: the concept, the guest it is for, the service model, the hours the room has to work across, and what the operator already knows about their own trade. The brief that results is written in covers, routes and hours as well as in adjectives.

Concept & Design Direction

Plan and character are proposed together, with the service diagram tested at the same time as the atmosphere. A layout that cannot be served properly is corrected here, while it costs a drawing rather than a season of trading, and the direction the operator approves is one the plan supports.

Integrated Design Development

Kitchen, cooling, extraction, drainage, power, fire strategy, acoustics and lighting are developed alongside the interior into one coordinated set. This is where a ceiling stays clean, a duct finds a route, and the room the operator approved survives contact with the services it needs.

Materials & Details

Finishes are specified for commercial wear rather than domestic use: surfaces that take cleaning, edges that take trolleys, upholstery that takes a full year of evenings. Junctions and joinery are drawn, samples are approved in hand, and the package is completed so the fit-out can be priced without interpretation.

Execution & Delivery

The fit-out proceeds under the studio's own execution oversight, against a programme that treats every closed day as the cost it is for an operator. Work is inspected against the drawings, testing and commissioning are witnessed, and the venue is snagged and handed over ready to open.

Where we work

The studio's work is concentrated in Dubai's established residential districts and the venues that serve them, where a new interior has to sit among neighbours who will hear and see the work being done.

A venue built inside a residential community is a different job from one in a purpose-built district. Working hours are shorter, deliveries are restricted, noise and waste are watched, and the landlord or master developer has consents of their own that sit in front of the authority's. The compensation is that the site manners a studio learns on private houses, closed sites, briefed teams and a client's privacy protected, are exactly the manners those locations require. Commissions are taken across Dubai and the wider United Arab Emirates. How villa design works in each of Dubai's communities.

United States

The studio also works in the United States, in Texas and Florida. The team, the process and the standard of finish travel with the commission; what changes is the climate, the local codes and the way a house sits on its plot, and those are answered on their own terms.

Houston, Texas
Austin, Texas
Miami, Florida
Orlando, Florida

What moves the cost of a hospitality fit-out?

Less than operators expect sits in the visible finishes, and more than they expect sits behind them. The kitchen and its extraction, the cooling capacity a full room needs, drainage and grease management, the acoustic build-up, the electrical load and the fire strategy carry the weight of a hospitality fit-out, and the condition of the unit taken on decides how much of that is new work rather than adaptation. A shell with the wrong services in the wrong places is a more expensive start than a plainer shell with the right ones.

The other mover is time, which is a cost on a venue in a way it is not on a house. A fit-out that overruns is a lease running against no trade, and the usual cause is a design that went to site before it was finished. That is the argument for closing the drawings properly and for holding the delivery inside the same practice. Every commission is scoped individually against the unit, the concept and the operation.

Why an integrated studio suits a venue

Hospitality projects are usually split between an interior designer, an MEP consultant, a kitchen supplier and a fit-out contractor, joined by drawings issued between them. Each does competent work inside its own package, and the venue's problems collect in the gaps: a duct that has nowhere to go, a ceiling that loses its line, a room that sounds wrong, a programme that nobody owns. The operator arbitrates, usually while also trying to open.

LKYOOB is arranged the other way. Architecture design, interior design, engineering, landscape design, project management and execution oversight are six disciplines in one team, so the service diagram, the engineering and the interior are resolved in the same room and delivered by the same practice. The studio brings the standards of its private residential work to commercial rooms: material quality proved in samples, benchmark areas approved before a full run, and a site that behaves properly.

Frequently asked questions

Does LKYOOB design hospitality interiors as well as private houses?

Yes. Hospitality interiors are part of the practice's work and part of what it is set up to deliver, with interior design, engineering, project management and execution oversight held in one team. The residential work sets the standard of material and detail, and the hospitality work adds the service planning, the commercial specification and the pace an operating business requires.

Can I see a venue LKYOOB has completed?

Completed hospitality work exists and the studio is glad to take you through it in person, at the studio in Jumeirah 1. What it does not do is publish a client's venue on its website without that client's agreement. The material belongs to the operator, and the studio treats the decision to release it as theirs to make rather than ours.

Will you work with our operator, kitchen consultant or brand team?

Yes, and it is usually the sensible arrangement. An operator knows their service model better than any designer, and a kitchen specialist knows their equipment. The studio holds the interior architecture and the coordination, takes those inputs early enough to plan around them properly, and resolves the conflicts between them on paper instead of letting them arrive on site.

Does LKYOOB handle the approvals a venue needs?

The practice prepares and lodges its own authority documentation rather than passing it to a separate consultant, and it is registered with Dubai Municipality for exactly that reason. A venue also answers to its landlord or master developer, and to the consents that attach to food service and public occupancy. The approval route is identified at the outset, because it shapes both the design and the programme.

We have taken a unit that was already a restaurant. Where do we start?

With an honest survey of what is behind the finishes: the extraction and its route, the cooling capacity, the drainage and grease provision, the electrical load and the condition of the fire systems. What is sound gets kept and what is not gets replaced. Starting there rather than with a mood board is what keeps a refit from discovering its real cost halfway through.

Can the studio deliver the fit-out, or only design it?

Both, and the model is built for both. The same practice that draws the interior carries the fit-out under its own execution oversight, so the drawings and the site do not belong to different companies with different interests. Where an operator already has a preferred fit-out contractor, the studio can instead hold the design and supervise the work against it.

If you are taking a unit, planning a concept, or looking again at a room that is not working as well as it should, a conversation at the studio in Jumeirah 1 is the useful first step. Bring the lease plan, the concept and whatever the operation already knows about itself.

Begin a conversation with the studio in Jumeirah.