ANARCHITECT
Architects · Middle East“Jonathan Ashmore founded ANARCHITECT in Dubai in 2013, since building a considered, quietly modernist body of work across the city and London both.”
Why ANARCHITECT is in the Design 100
Jonathan Ashmore founded ANARCHITECT in Dubai in 2013, and the practice has spent the years since building a body of work defined by restraint rather than spectacle — a considered, quietly modernist approach in a market that more often rewards the opposite. Adaptive-reuse projects such as the Al Faya Desert Retreat & Spa, which turned two derelict desert structures near Sharjah into a five-room retreat using local materials and vernacular forms, show the studio’s instinct for working with what’s already there rather than starting from nothing.
That same sensibility has carried the practice beyond the UAE: a London studio, opened in 2019, extends ANARCHITECT’s reach into European residential and commercial work without diluting its founding language. Between the two cities, the studio has built a reputation among design-conscious clients for architecture that favours material honesty and contextual thinking over ornament — the kind of quiet confidence the Design 100 was built to single out.