Why LUMI Interiors is in the Design 100

Alua Kul founded LUMI Interiors in Dubai after training in interior architecture and design in London, and that grounding still shows in the studio’s own description of its work as a “London aesthetic” — tailored, restrained, comfortable dressing up when a brief calls for it. The method itself is less a fixed house style than a working process, built project by project around the architecture already in place and the brief a client brings to it, rather than a signature imposed from outside.

That process has produced a run of substantial Gulf residences, including a Palm Jumeirah penthouse and the Zahrat Al Jannah and Alma projects, alongside a growing slate of work across the UK, Europe and Asia. It also makes LUMI Interiors the rare regional studio with a Conversations interview already on record on this site — proof, as much as anything on this list, that the Gulf’s interior design scene has fully arrived.