NESTT by H2R and Nakkash Design Studio Casts the Basin at Two Heights

Hospitality · Dubai

Reading time: 10 min

A café with a children’s play centre inside it usually solves the problem by zoning: adults here, children over there, a glass wall between them. NESTT, at Q East in Al Quoz, does almost none of that. The argument instead sits in the details, and the clearest of them is a washbasin cast in one piece that steps down from adult height to child height without a break.

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NESTT Dubai opened at the start of October at Q East, the live and work development by Alphabeta in Al Quoz Industrial Third. It runs to 11,000 square feet across two levels, it holds a café, a children’s play environment, multifunction rooms and an art studio, and it was designed by H2R Design with Nakkash Design Studio.

The brief was a playground for all ages. That is the kind of phrase that usually survives into the press material and nowhere else. Here it survives into the joinery, and the quickest way to see it is to go to the washrooms.

The basin that settles the argument

In the washrooms there is a single vanity cast in a grey speckled concrete, and partway along its length it steps down. One basin sits at adult height. The other sits at the height of a five year old. The splashback steps with it, the mirror above it steps with it, and the two brushed brass bowls and their wall-mounted taps are the same bowls and the same taps at both levels. It is one object, not a counter with a stool pushed under it.

That is a small piece of joinery and it decides the whole building. The ordinary way to design for families is to make an adult room and then add a children’s version of each thing in it: a low basin in a separate cubicle, a kids’ menu in a different typeface, a play area behind glass. NESTT takes the opposite approach almost everywhere, which is to design one thing properly and give it two heights, two scales or two ways in.

The same logic runs through the plan. Instead of a glazed wall between the cafe and the play floor, NESTT cuts circles. In one room a wall of grey burl veneer carries a round window that looks through into the double-height stair volume. In the main dining room another circular opening is aimed straight at the play structure, so that from a horseshoe banquette, over the planting, you are looking into the timber nests. Supervision becomes an aperture rather than a partition, and it is pointed at the best thing in the building rather than at a corridor.

The burl does the rest of the work. Its swirling grain shifts as you move past it, which is a fairly sophisticated surface to put at the centre of a venue with a ball pit in it, and it is the clearest signal that the adults were not an afterthought here.

A ceiling made of nests

The lower play level is where the building earns its name, and calling it a forest undersells it. Overhead, stacked rings of ribbed timber are assembled into a cluster of hollow pods, each one open at the end and closed with a woven mesh disc. Packed into the gaps between them is a mass of fine brushwood, exactly as a bird would leave it, with felt leaves scattered through. You are standing underneath a canopy of nests.

The canopy of nests, and the ribbed timber rings at close range. Photography: Natelee Cocks

Below them the walls are a deep ribbed green, cut with arched openings scaled to a child rather than to a door. A green tube slide drops out of the structure. The floor is a green speckled rubber that rises into a soft-edged pit filled with blush and cream foam blocks. The dedicated play equipment is by HPS.

Around the younger children’s room the palette lightens. There is a yellow ball pit with a terracotta upholstered rim, tiers of olive upholstered steps, a timber play house with arched openings trimmed in terracotta, and a custom wallpaper developed with The Wallpaper Kids that runs toadstools, trees and bunting around the room with NESTT’s own characters in it. Clusters of spherical paper pendants hang like small clouds, most of them white and one of them coral.

Children move up through a vertical tunnel, and the colour changes with them.

Above the clouds

The upper play level is deep blue, and its ceiling is the best idea in the project. The soffit here is the raw one, services and all, and rather than box it in, the design hangs several hundred white spheres from it in a dense drift, thickest in the middle and thinning at the edges. The clouds are the ceiling treatment. The suspended spheres are by DreamLab.

Through them run the same ribbed timber tunnels, larger here, bridged with cargo netting and reached by a rope ladder. The floor is a blue rubber crumb that swells into a climbable mound studded with holds, with a timber-lined tunnel bored through it. The blue does the obvious thing and puts the children above the weather, but it is also the one surface in the building allowed to be properly dark, which is what makes the white spheres read as cloud rather than as decoration.

The transition from forest floor to sky is handled vertically, through a tunnel, rather than by walking through a door into a differently coloured room. For a child, the climb is the story.

Sound, treated as a material

The most unusual line in NESTT’s budget is the acoustics. The team worked with 21dB, an acoustic consultancy that operates between Beirut and Dubai, and commissioned acoustic studies across the venue rather than buying a ceiling raft at the end of the job.

What came back is built into the design language rather than bolted onto it. In the food and beverage area the sound-absorbing ceiling panels are cut as interlocking puzzle pieces. The multifunction rooms get double-glazed windows and acoustic ceilings so that a birthday party stays inside its own room. Perforated wall linings work quietly through the rest of the plan. None of it announces itself as acoustic treatment, which is the point.

The loudspeakers are worth naming because of where they come from. The system uses Booq, which runs its headquarters in Dubai and its research and development in Beirut, and which describes itself as the first loudspeaker manufacturing project in the MENA and GCC region. The smaller rooms take the compact Hepta 4 paired with Quadra 12 subwoofers; the main space takes the larger Hepta 6. The cabinets are seven-sided, and in the café they are mounted on the wall in pale timber-coloured housings where most venues would have hidden a black box in the ceiling. The sound equipment in this Dubai room was specified and built in the region, which is not something that could have been written about a Dubai café ten years ago.

There is a reason the acoustics were taken this seriously. NESTT was founded by Mad-Room Group with Sarah Raslan, a child psychologist and co-founder of The Wise Parent. Nobody commissions a full acoustic study for a soft play venue unless somebody at the table already knows what a reverberant room does to a child who is tired. The puzzle pieces in the ceiling are the visible end of a decision taken much earlier.

The room the adults were promised

The café had to be good enough to visit without a child, and it is.

The main dining hall keeps its raw soffit, painted out white with the sprinkler runs left red, and hangs enormous looping rings of light below it. The seating is the most useful thing in the room: deep coral banquettes built as complete circles around a central table, so a group can sit all the way round and anybody at the table can see out. A timber lattice screen runs along one side at standing height, high enough to divide and low enough to see over.

Elsewhere the café is quieter. A blush banquette runs along the burl wall under the porthole, with white tables on green bases, soft green chairs and small mushroom lamps. Another room sets a deep red curved banquette against a green wall under heavy planting, with timber columns carrying uplighters. The counter is faced in panels of warm chestnut burl alternating with mint glass, finished with a brass toe line, and a rig of slender crimson rods suspends a glass and timber shelf with a single globe lamp in it.

The counter in chestnut burl and mint glass, and a quieter corner of the café. Photography: Natelee Cocks

Underfoot it is pale terrazzo throughout. The material palette, timber, terrazzo, burl, green lacquer and brass, is the same on the play floors as it is at the bar, which is why the building does not feel like two venues sharing an address.

Two studios, and a shared address

H2R Design is run from Dubai and London by Hasan and Husain Roomi, and this site has followed the practice for some years: Brew in Mirdif and in Jumeirah, Brau across Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, Nette at Al Barari. The thread through all of them is a willingness to let one piece of joinery organise a whole room, which is exactly what happens here with the counter and with the stair.

Nakkash Design Studio is newer to these pages. It works from Building 7 in Dubai Design District, and its founder and design director, Omar Nakkash, comes out of a Dubai furniture family: the Nakkash business was established in the city in 1983 by Wajih Nakkash. Recent work includes the executive floors at Dubai Chambers and a tropical modernist villa in The Meadows.

Green thresholds and the corridor through to the multifunction rooms. Photography: Natelee Cocks

On a project like this the division of labour is less interesting than the agreement. Both studios have landed on the same position, which is that a venue for children is not a brief to be solved with bright colours and a lower ceiling, but an ordinary hospitality brief with a second set of dimensions in it.

Where NESTT sits

Q East is an Alphabeta development on Street 3 in Al Quoz Industrial Third, and it has been assembled as a live and work block rather than a mall: loft apartments above, a members’ club, a food hall, a cinema, fitness, a podcast studio and events space. Al Quoz has been the city’s warehouse-arts quarter for well over a decade, and Q East is an attempt to give that neighbourhood somewhere to live and work rather than only somewhere to exhibit.

NESTT opened into a busy few weeks. Dubai Design Week runs from 3 to 8 November at Dubai Design District, with Downtown Design from the 4th, and Nakkash Design Studio works from d3 itself. Anyone making the trip for the fairs is twenty minutes from Al Quoz.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Family hospitality is usually designed defensively. The children are contained, the adults are compensated, and the two groups are kept apart by whatever the budget allows.

NESTT spends its money in a different order. It buys an acoustic study before it buys decoration. It builds a canopy of real nests instead of printing a forest on a wall. It cuts a circle through a burl wall rather than glazing a viewing window. And it casts one basin at two heights, which costs very little and says more about the brief than any amount of colour could.

That last one is the detail to look for. Everything else in the building follows from the same decision.