Downtown Design 2018: glass, light and the arrival of Downtown Editions

DUBAI DESIGN WEEK · DUBAI

Reading time: 11 min

The sixth edition of Downtown Design ran from 13 to 16 November 2018 and did two things at once. It absorbed the region’s collectible design fair into a trade hall, and it filled that hall with hand-blown glass. Those two facts are more connected than they look.

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Trade fairs are usually described by their numbers, and the numbers for the sixth edition of Downtown Design were good. One hundred and seventy five brands, forty per cent of them exhibiting for the first time, forty regional designers, sixteen thousand visitors across four days on the d3 waterfront. Dubai Design Week, in its fourth edition around it, drew seventy five thousand people to the district and put on two hundred and fifty events across the city.

None of that tells you what the fair actually looked like, or what it was arguing. What it looked like, once you had walked two or three aisles, was a building full of glass. Blown glass, cast glass, mirrored glass, crystal, tinted glass, glass hung in clouds and glass stacked into totems. Lighting was not one category among many in 2018. It was the medium most of the memorable work was made in, and that was not an accident of taste.

The reason sits in the other thing the sixth edition did. Downtown Design 2018 launched Downtown Editions, a curated section for bespoke and limited-edition pieces. It was presented as an addition. It was also a subtraction, because Downtown Editions is what became of Design Days Dubai, and understanding that trade is the most useful way to read the fair.

Klove Studio

Design Days Dubai went into the aisle

Design Days Dubai launched in 2012 as the only collectible design fair in the Middle East and South Asia. For six editions it ran in March alongside Art Dubai, in its own tent, on its own terms, with the pacing of an art fair rather than a furniture show. Galleries brought one-off pieces. There were talks, workshops and live making. It was the place regional collectors learned that design could be bought the way art is bought.

In 2018 it moved. The announcement in February that year was direct about it: after six successful years showing collectible design to the Middle East market, Design Days Dubai would move to November under a new name, Downtown Editions. Rawan Kashkoush, head of programming, called the fair the city’s own wunderkammer and described the move as a natural progression, with the two fairs now standing side by side. William Knight, director of Dubai Design Week, framed it as consolidation that would strengthen Dubai’s position as the design capital of the region.

Klove Studio

The logic is compelling. Consolidation is real. A collector flying in for one week rather than two is a genuine argument, and Downtown Design under fair director Rue Kothari had the commercial machinery to carry a collectible section at scale. Kothari called the sixth edition the most ambitious to date, with more than sixty five new brands and Downtown Editions debuting.

Something specific is gained when a collectible fair becomes a section. A separate fair sets its own rhythm. Visitors arrive expecting to look slowly at a small number of expensive things. A trade hall brings a different rhythm, because most of the people walking it are specifiers with a project deadline and a shortlist. Put a one-off hand-blown piece in that traffic and it meets an audience with the budget to commission it.

Which brings the argument back to glass. Glass is the one material that wins in both economies at once. It photographs, so it survives the fast walk. It cannot be mass produced without losing what makes it worth buying, so it stays collectible. In a fair that had just merged a slow market into a fast one, glass was the material that did not have to choose.

Marc Ange ‘Le Refuge’

A hall planned like a small city

The 2018 fair was master-planned by the architects H+A around the theme of liveable cities, and the plan did more work than fair plans usually do. Rather than laying out a uniform grid of booths and putting catering in a corner, the layout broke the hall into something closer to a district, with bespoke café concepts, pop-up retail, planted indoor landscapes and activations pulled out to the waterfront edge.

The practical effect was pace control. Planting and cafés slow people down. A visitor who has sat down once walks the second half of a fair differently from one who has not. For a fair that had just taken on a section of slow objects, engineering pauses into the plan was the correct structural decision, and it is the sort of decision that never appears in a review because nobody photographs a circulation strategy.

It is worth saying how far the plan carried the theme. Liveable cities is a broad idea, and applying it to a temporary hall gave the fair both a look and a logic. The planting read as atmosphere and as proposition at once. The idea was sound and the execution was genuinely hospitable.

Le Refuge and the object built for the lens

The most photographed object of the week was not in the fair at all in spirit, though it was very much part of the week. Marc Ange‘s Le Refuge is a daybed sheltered under oversized leaves, and by November 2018 it had already had one enormous life.

Ange is French and Italian, born in Rome in 1978, trained at ESDI in Paris and briefly a car designer in Turin before founding his studio Bloom Room in 2008. Le Refuge appeared at Wallpaper* Handmade in Milan in April 2017 and became the most photographed thing at that year’s design week, which won it a Wallpaper* Design Award in 2018. The design is very simple: a curved upholstered bed, and above it a canopy of large fronds on slender stems, so that lying down puts you inside a small green room. Ange has described it as the projection of a childhood memory, a shelter built out of imagined jungle.

Marc Ange ‘Le Refuge’

An object that becomes famous through a photograph has usually earned that fame twice over. Le Refuge works in a picture because it works in space. The canopy is a real enclosure, not a graphic. The leaves sit at the height where a body lying down feels covered, and the stems are thin enough that the canopy reads as shade rather than roof. The photograph is a consequence of the proportion, not a substitute for it.

What it does show is what the rest of the fair had in hand. An object can travel the world as an image, and the fair supplies the part the image cannot carry. Standing in front of Le Refuge in Dubai gave you two things a photograph could not: scale, and the strange softness of a foliage form rendered at furniture weight. That is the margin every exhibitor in the hall was working, and it is where the room wins.

Preciosa took the opposite bet

Preciosa‘s Breath of Light answered the question by making the photograph insufficient on purpose. The installation is a cloud of hand-blown Bohemian crystal spheres, some clear, some frosted, hung so that they read as bubbles caught mid-rise. Around the edge sit orbs you blow into. Blow, and the light in the cloud shifts and the sound shifts with it.

Michael Vasku, Preciosa’s creative director, put the intent plainly when the piece was shown in Milan earlier in 2018, saying that with design and technical ingenuity it is possible to turn the properties of a chandelier into a playful installation. It took a Red Dot award that year.

Preciosa

The design decision worth noticing is not the interaction, which is the easy part to describe. It is the irregularity. Preciosa let the bubbles vary, because bubbles in life vary, and hand-blowing produces that variation for free. A perfectly regular field of spheres would have read as a product. An irregular one reads as a phenomenon, and only then does the breath mechanic make sense, because you are not adjusting a light fitting, you are disturbing something.

This is the sharper end of the same argument Le Refuge opened. One object is complete in a photograph and generous in person. The other keeps its best card for the room, and plays it the moment you stand in it and exhale. A fair that can hold both is doing its job.

Preciosa

Lasvit, Klove and glass as a regional argument

The Czech glass house Lasvit showed FLOW, made with the Dubai studio Albal Design Studio, and the collaboration is more interesting than the object list suggests. Lasvit’s entire proposition is that industrial-scale glass can be made to behave like craft, and its Dubai credentials were already built into the city at Dubai Opera. Pairing that with a d3-based studio is a small but real statement about where the design authorship of a glass piece in this region should sit.

Klove Studio from New Delhi, founded by Prateek Jain and Gautam Seth in 2006, brought the week’s most unlikely stand: a gypsy caravan, Shamanic Soul, fitted with blown glass totem pillars. Klove’s work has always been formally driven and rooted in Indian references, temple architecture, jewellery and festival light, executed in hand-blown glass combined with brass, wrought iron, wire work and acrylic. The caravan gave those pieces an interior to belong to instead of a plinth, which is a smarter piece of stand design than it first appears. A totem lamp on a white plinth is a product. The same lamp in a caravan is a place, and a place is what a hall of eight hundred products is short of.

Lasvit

Read the two together and a regional argument emerges. Glass sits alongside the established heritage crafts of the Gulf, weaving, palm frond work and plaster, rather than replacing any of them. What Dubai brings to it is buying power, an appetite for ambitious design and enough construction to absorb serious quantities of specified lighting. The 2018 fair showed a market in which glass houses from Bohemia and workshops from Delhi come to sell, and regional studios increasingly come to co-author as well as to purchase. That is a meaningful shift in position, and it was visible in the stands rather than in any panel discussion.

Manfredi Style, and the booth as a room

The stand that best understood the aisle problem belonged to Manfredi Style, designed by the Milan practice Studio Milo, whose team on the gallery’s 2018 work included Roberto Rondini and Rossella Giannella. The approach was theatrical in a controlled way: heavy blue PVC drapery defining the space, so that the booth stopped being a three-sided box and became a room you entered.

Inside, the objects were chosen to be looked at rather than specified. Wink, a gold-plated fringed light, treats metal as something that hangs and moves. The Kocohedron chandelier, designed by Willem Schouten with Koen Coppens for Kocowisch, is the opposite instinct, a rigorous polyhedral geometry that turns a lamp into a mathematical exercise. A mirrored cabinet by the Italian maker Effetto Vetro, its face made up of dozens of small glass diamond tiles, sat between the two, decorative in language but exacting in execution.

Manfredi Style

Curatorially this is a gallery move, not a trade one. The pieces do not share a style. They share a level of making. Placing them in a draped room asks visitors to compare them on craft rather than on category, which is exactly the reading a collectible section is supposed to encourage. That a commercial gallery did it more convincingly than most is worth noting.

Nakkash and the regional pieces that stayed calm

Against all that theatre, Wajih and Omar Nakkash showed restraint. The Tawazun collection, meaning balance, is three pieces, a console and two coffee tables, built from white Carrara marble bases and brass tops, with the base doing double duty as a planter. It is a straightforward material conversation: one heavy, cold, veined and quarried; one warm, thin and worked. The balance in the name is literal, and the pieces succeed or fail on proportion alone, because there is nothing else in them to hide behind. They succeed.

NAKKASH

Alongside it, the Liberty Window work continued the studio’s habit of taking a regional architectural motif and pulling it towards furniture rather than pastiche. Nakkash has spent years occupying a difficult position in Dubai, selling imported European brands through the gallery while building its own design output through the studio. Showing original collections at Downtown Design is how that second identity gets taken seriously, and 2018 was a year it looked convincing.

What the sixth edition settled and what it set up

The fair got three things right. The plan slowed people down. The new section gave limited-edition work a formal home rather than leaving it scattered. And the exhibitor mix, forty per cent of it new, was broad enough that the hall did not feel like a European furniture fair with a Gulf postcode.

NAKKASH

Two things were set up for the years ahead. The first is Downtown Editions inheriting the slow-looking market that Design Days Dubai built over six years, and bringing that audience through the busiest front door in the city. The second is authorship. Striking work in 2018 came from Bohemia, Milan and Delhi. The regional presence was strongest in the calmest work, the marble and brass, the collaborations, the co-authorship. That is a genuine advance, and a firm step towards a market that authors as well as buys.

Both of those get built on in the halls that follow, not in the reviews.

Editor’s note: Downtown Editions, launched in 2018 and described throughout this piece, is a curated section within Downtown Design. It should not be confused with Editions, the standalone limited-edition art and design fair that launched in November 2024 under Art Dubai Group. Same lineage, six years apart, and two different things.

Frequently asked questions

Manfredi Style

Lasvit

Final thoughts

The sixth edition of Downtown Design will be remembered for a photograph, because Le Refuge is the kind of object that produces one. The more consequential thing that happened in that hall was structural. A collectible design fair that had spent six years teaching a city how to look slowly brought that habit with it into the main hall.

That was a promotion, and the aisle made the case immediately. The evidence from 2018 was encouraging throughout, because the work that stopped people was work that could not be made quickly: hand-blown crystal, marble cut to a tolerance, glass totems in a caravan, a canopy of leaves proportioned to a lying body. The fair had merged a slow market into a fast one, and the slow objects won the room.