CMPLX: Alserkal is an avenue, this one is a courtyard, and Al Quoz needs both

ARCHITECTURE · DUBAI

Reading time: 10 min

Seven warehouses on a corner plot in Al Quoz, a short walk from Alserkal Avenue, clad in fluted metal. The comparison is unavoidable and it is also the least interesting thing about it. Alserkal is an avenue. CMPLX is a courtyard. Those are two different pieces of urbanism, and a maturing creative district needs both.

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CMPLX opens in Q4 2026 on a corner plot where Al Manara Road meets 6th Street, inside the Al Quoz Creative Zone. It is a collective of seven purpose-built warehouses arranged around a single private courtyard, designed by Bone Studio for Rashed Al Tayer, founder of the Dubai hospitality group Outset.

Confirmed occupants so far are Dawn, a reformer Pilates, hot yoga and barre studio, Fragment, a specialty coffee roastery, Neighbors, an all-day restaurant and bakery connected to Fragment, Hikiniku To Come, the Japanese concept operated in the UAE by Fyte Hospitality, and a dedicated events warehouse for exhibitions, workshops, pop-ups and takeovers.

It sits a few hundred metres from Alserkal Avenue and The Courtyard, it is clad in fluted metal, and it is a group of warehouses around an open space. Everyone who sees it will make the comparison, and there is nothing wrong with that. Alserkal built the audience, the habit and the postcode that make a project like this possible at all.

But the two buildings are answering different questions, and the difference is legible in the plan rather than the elevation.

Alserkal Avenue is an avenue. Its organising element is a route: a street with warehouses along it, grown incrementally out of an existing industrial estate over more than a decade. You move down it and things happen on either side.

CMPLX is a courtyard. Its organising element is a room: a single open space with seven buildings turned to face it, drawn from scratch on a blank corner plot. You arrive into the middle of it and everything happens around you.

One is a street. The other is a room. That is not a small distinction, and it produces almost everything else about how the place will work.

More than half the plot is not built on

The clearest evidence for the courtyard argument is in the numbers, and they are worth setting out because nobody else will.

The seven warehouses have ground floors of 185, 235, 185, 240, 196, 230 and 230 square metres. That is 1,501 square metres of building on a plot of 3,250. Five of the seven carry mezzanines of between 28 and 63 square metres, adding 258 more.

So the footprint covers roughly 46 per cent of the site. Put the other way round, around 1,749 square metres of the plot is open ground: courtyard, garden, planting and the shaded routes between the buildings. There is more outside than inside.

In an industrial estate that is a genuinely bold decision. The default in Al Quoz, and in industrial land almost everywhere, is to build to the boundary and take whatever floor area the plot ratio allows. Warehouses are cheap per square metre and open ground earns nothing directly. Giving away more than half of a prime corner site to a garden is the kind of move a developer makes when they have decided the open space is the product.

Bone Studio are candid that commerce drove the study. The practice describes the approach as reverse engineered, with built-up area central to making the development work. What is interesting is what happened inside that constraint. Rather than pushing the buildings outward to fill the site, they shaped the form specifically to gain landscaping area, and then found another way to recover the floor space.

The cantilever is how they paid for the garden

That other way is the single best detail in the project.

The mezzanine floor extends further than the ground floor. Each upper level oversails the footprint below it as a cantilever, projecting out over the routes between the buildings.

That does two things with one move.

It recovers lettable area at first floor, which is where the commercial case is rebuilt after so much of the ground has been given to landscape. And, more importantly, it throws shade. The overhang turns the gaps between the buildings into covered corridors, so the green routes through the site are protected from direct sun for a large part of the day.

Read that again in the context of the climate. A landscaped courtyard in Dubai is only usable if it is shaded, and shade normally has to be bought separately in the form of canopies, pergolas, sails or trees that take years to grow. Here it comes free, as a by-product of the floor area the project needed anyway.

One structural decision, two returns: square metres upstairs, comfort downstairs. That is the sort of resolution that only comes from taking the commercial brief seriously rather than treating it as an obstacle, and it is why the plan holds together.

Blind on the outside, glass on the inside

The section is inverted, and deliberately.

The outward-facing elevations are blind façades: solid, unglazed, clad in vertically fluted metal. They give nothing to the street. Bone Studio are explicit that this was a response to the surroundings, isolating users from the traffic and noise of a working industrial area while cutting sound and sightlines into the site.

Turn inward and the treatment reverses completely. Every warehouse opens onto the courtyard with full-height bifold doors and panoramic glazing, so an operator can fold an entire elevation away and let the unit and the garden become one room.

A conventional retail development does precisely the opposite. It puts its glass on the street, because the street is where the customers are and the shopfront is the advertisement. CMPLX turns its back on the road and spends its entire glazing budget on the inside.

That is the logic of a courtyard house, and it is a very old idea in this part of the world. The Emirati housh, the courtyard at the centre of a traditional home, works on exactly this principle: closed and protective to the outside, open and generous to the middle, with the courtyard doing the environmental work. CMPLX arrives at the same arrangement from a commercial brief rather than a domestic one, which makes the correspondence more interesting rather than less.

The material treatment supports it. Fluted metal is the honest language of Al Quoz, the industrial estate’s own vernacular, and using it at this level of precision keeps the buildings in conversation with their neighbours instead of announcing themselves against them. Inside, the renders show poured floors, exposed soffits, ribbed metal linings and a fine steel stair, which is a restrained palette that leaves the operators room to make their own mark.

Unit size is doing curatorial work

Here is a quieter decision with a large consequence.

The seven units run from 185 to 240 square metres at ground level. That is a narrow band, and it is small.

A unit of that size is too tight for a large international chain, which needs volume and back-of-house to make its model work. It is also comfortably too big for a market stall or a pop-up counter. What it fits almost exactly is a founder-run business at the point where it is ready for its first serious permanent home: a roastery with a bakery attached, a boutique fitness studio, a single-concept restaurant.

The press material talks about curation and community over tenancy, and about championing independent brands. That language is easy to write. The plan is what makes it real. By fixing the units in that band, the building selects its occupants by geometry before anyone signs anything. A precinct that wanted anchor tenants would have drawn two or three big boxes instead.

The flexibility is built in as well. Five of the seven units carry a note of provision to extend the mezzanine, and two currently without a mezzanine carry provision to build one. So the same shell can be a single-height gallery volume, a two-level restaurant or a studio with offices above, depending on who takes it. That is a warehouse doing what warehouses have always been good at, which is accepting whatever is put inside them.

Bone Studio, and a client they already know

Worth naming the makers properly, because the practice is less widely known than the project deserves.

Bone Studio was founded in Dubai in 2018 by Achraf Mzily and Natalie Mahakian, working across architecture and interior design on commercial, residential and landscape projects. The studio describes its work as eliminating excess and keeping essential form, aiming for a dialogue between people and architecture through earthy materiality and detailing.

The line that matters most for reading CMPLX is their stated interest in designing spaces that can serve more than one purpose, reinterpreting how common spaces are defined. A precinct of seven adaptable shells around a shared room is that idea at its full scale.

There is also a working history here that explains the confidence of the scheme. Bone Studio designed Terra, the Mediterranean restaurant that sits in the Outset portfolio alongside Oppidan and Boston Lane, and which was widely published internationally. Client and architect have built together before, at the scale of a single room, and CMPLX is the same partnership at the scale of a city block.

That continuity is visible in the result. Projects designed by studios meeting their client for the first time tend to hedge. This one commits to a single organising idea and follows it through the plan, the section and the cladding without wavering.

The project has been in development for some time. It won Project of the Future at the Identity Design Awards in 2021, which means the courtyard scheme has been resolved and refined over five years before opening.

Why Al Quoz needs more than one of these

This is the part that reaches beyond one building.

Al Quoz has been Dubai’s creative quarter for over a decade, and it got there in the way the best creative quarters always do: cheap industrial space, high ceilings, tolerant landlords and people who arrived before there was any strategy telling them to. Alserkal Avenue is the reason the district has an international reputation, and its influence on everything now being built nearby is direct and acknowledged.

What changes when a district succeeds is that a single destination stops being enough.

Galleries, studios, roasteries, fitness concepts, event spaces, retail and restaurants all want to be in the same postcode, but they want very different buildings. A gallery needs long blank walls, controlled light and a wide door. A reformer Pilates studio needs a low reverberation time, a specific ceiling height and changing rooms. A roastery needs extraction, a delivery yard and a floor that can take a machine. A restaurant needs a kitchen, a grease line and a terrace.

One estate cannot be optimised for all of them, and it should not try. What a mature district produces instead is specialisation: several destinations within walking distance of each other, each built for a particular kind of tenant, sharing an audience that moves between them.

That is what makes CMPLX interesting at district scale rather than just at plot scale. It is not an alternative to Alserkal. It is the second piece of a larger fabric, purpose-built where Alserkal was adapted, inward-facing where Alserkal is linear, and pitched at hospitality, wellness and retail where Alserkal’s centre of gravity is contemporary art.

The Al Quoz Creative Zone designation exists precisely to encourage this, and a district with an avenue, a courtyard and whatever comes third is more useful to Dubai’s design economy than a single large campus would be. More footfall, more reasons to spend a whole day, more room for the next independent operator to find a shell that suits them.

That is how a creative district turns into a creative quarter.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy version of this story writes itself. New warehouses, fluted metal, Al Quoz, five minutes from Alserkal. A new Alserkal.

The version worth keeping is in the site plan. Somebody took a prime corner plot in an industrial area, decided that more than half of it would be garden, and then found a way to pay for that decision by cantilevering the first floor out over the routes below so the same square metres bought floor area and shade at the same time.

Everything else follows from that. The blind outward walls that make the middle feel protected. The glazing that all faces inward. The unit sizes that quietly select for independent operators. The seven buildings turned to look at each other rather than at the road.

Alserkal Avenue gave Al Quoz a street. CMPLX is giving it a room. A district that has both is a considerably more interesting place than one that has either.