INTERIORS · RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA
Reading time: 6 minTwenty-three storeys in As Sahafah, finished in concrete and wood, designed by a practice from Tbilisi. The material language looks like the global minimalism of the last decade — but in Riyadh, concrete is not only an aesthetic. It is the oldest environmental idea the Najd has.
Riyadh is being built at a pace that few cities have ever attempted, and one of the quieter consequences is a question worth asking of every new tower that appears: who is designing it, and what have they brought with them?
The MENA Residential Building, a 23-storey residential tower in the As Sahafah district of northern Riyadh, is a useful case. Its interiors are the work of Spectrum, a practice founded in 2014 and based in Tbilisi, Georgia — a design-build studio working across architecture, interiors and masterplanning, and one that has now built a portfolio in Saudi Arabia including a mixed-use tower for the city.
That is not the sort of credit line the Gulf design press was writing ten years ago. It tells you something real about where Saudi Arabia’s building boom is sourcing its ideas — and it is a far more interesting starting point than the word “minimalism”.
The building
The tower rises across a 1,400 square metre site to a total built-up area of roughly 11,000 square metres, over 23 storeys.
Its architectural presence is deliberately restrained: clean vertical lines, carefully judged massing, an elevation that resolves itself quietly. In a city building with extraordinary ambition and scale, with New Murabba, Diriyah and King Salman Park all under way, a residential tower of this composure is, in its own way, a position.
The interiors carry the argument, and they rest on two materials.
Concrete and wood, and why concrete is not a pose
Concrete and wood form the entire palette. Concrete gives solidity, coolness and a certain unarguable modernity. Wood introduces warmth and returns the spaces to human scale. Minimalist furnishings and sculptural accents complete a language that is, by now, globally legible — you could find versions of it in Copenhagen, Melbourne, São Paulo or Seoul.
And it would be easy, and lazy, to stop there and call it international minimalism arriving in Riyadh.
But concrete in a desert city is doing something that concrete in Copenhagen is not. It is thermal mass — a heavy material that absorbs heat slowly through the day and releases it slowly through the night, flattening the extremes at both ends. It is the reason a stone church is cool in August.
And thermal mass happens to be the founding principle of Najdi architecture. The traditional mudbrick buildings of central Arabia — thick-walled, small-windowed, organised around shaded courtyards — were not built that way for looks. They were built that way because mass is how you survive a Riyadh summer without machinery.
So a contemporary tower in As Sahafah, finished in exposed concrete, sits close to the region’s oldest environmental intelligence. Spectrum has landed on a result that reads as considered rather than imported, and in a city drawing on studios from all over the world, that local logic is worth noticing.
Wood does the necessary counterwork. Concrete alone in a hot climate can tip from calm into austere; the warmth of timber, applied generously across cabinetry and surfaces, keeps the interiors habitable in the emotional sense as well as the thermal one.
Light, and the discipline of the open plan
The interiors are organised around openness. Living, kitchen and dining spaces flow into one another, and large expanses of glazing pull daylight deep into the plan, animating the concrete surfaces as the sun moves across them.
Glass and daylight in Riyadh ask a great deal of a design. Daylight is a gift, and controlling solar gain is the craft that sits beneath it. An interior like this rests on how carefully the glazing is shaded, oriented and specified: the invisible engineering beneath a very visible aesthetic.
The design is unambiguously convincing in how it treats light as material. Concrete is a surface that changes character hour by hour under direct sun, moving from soft grey to something almost luminous. A palette this restrained gives light room to perform, and the interiors are clearly composed with that in mind.
The kitchen is the clearest expression of the whole approach: expansive wooden cabinetry, marble worktops, integrated appliances — the refinement of a serious culinary space, warmed rather than chilled by its materials. This is minimalism as refinement rather than austerity, where restraint is what allows texture and light to speak.
A vertical neighbourhood
The amenities tell you who this building is for, and how contemporary Riyadh actually lives.
- a premium gym
- a co-working space
- a residents’ lounge
- a kids’ club
- a swimming pool
The co-working space is the significant one. It is a straightforwardly post-pandemic piece of programming, and its presence in a Riyadh residential tower says something about a young, professional, hybrid-working population that did not exist here in this form a decade ago. The kids’ club, meanwhile, signals a family market rather than a purely investor one.
Together they turn the building into what the trade now calls a vertical neighbourhood: a place where work, wellness, childcare and social life are all within the same envelope. That is a global model, but it lands with particular force in a city where the summer makes the outdoors briefly uninhabitable and interior life is not a preference but a necessity.
Riyadh, and who builds it
What I find most telling about this project is not any single design decision, but the credit line.
Saudi Arabia’s building programme is the largest of its generation, and the studios delivering it are no longer drawn only from the familiar roster of London, New York and Rotterdam. A practice founded in Tbilisi in 2014 is now shaping how people live in northern Riyadh. That is a genuine widening of the field, and it should be understood as a strength: it brings different training, different reference points, and a different relationship to material.
A programme this size moves ideas around the world at speed, and good ideas travel, as they always have. What gives a tower in As Sahafah its own character is the way an international language settles into the climate it is built for.
MENA Residential Building shows how that is done, because its central material choice turns out to have local logic beneath its global surface. It looks like the world. It behaves, in the ways that matter in forty-five degrees, like the Najd.
Frequently asked questions
Where is the MENA Residential Building?
In As Sahafah, a district of northern Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Who designed it?
The interior design concept is by Spectrum, a design-build practice founded in 2014 and based in Tbilisi, Georgia, working across architecture, interiors and masterplanning.
How big is it?
Twenty-three storeys, on a 1,400 sq m site, with a total built-up area of around 11,000 sq m.
What materials define the interiors?
Concrete and wood, with marble worktops in the kitchens — a restrained palette in which texture and daylight carry the composition.
What amenities does it offer?
A premium gym, a co-working space, a residents’ lounge, a kids’ club and a swimming pool.
Why concrete in a desert city?
Beyond aesthetics, concrete provides thermal mass — absorbing heat slowly by day and releasing it slowly by night. It is the same principle that governed traditional Najdi mudbrick architecture in central Arabia.
Final thoughts
One reading of MENA Residential Building is that global minimalism has reached Riyadh, in concrete and wood, and photographs beautifully.
The better reading is that a studio from Tbilisi has arrived in the Najd and reached, perhaps without meaning to, for the one material strategy the region has relied upon for centuries: put mass between yourself and the sun, and let the interior stay cool and quiet while the city outside burns.
Riyadh is producing spectacular buildings this year, and this one carries an idea as old and as intelligent as the Najd itself. Spectrum is bringing that same idea to its first international branch in the Gulf, a tower rising elsewhere in the city.
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