Interiors · Dubai
Reading time: 6 minFor 160 years, The Arts Club never left its Mayfair townhouse. Its first move abroad took it to Dubai, and not to another period building but into a cool glass tower by Foster + Partners. The task fell to Milan’s Dimorestudio: to make the warm, eccentric, art-soaked soul of a Victorian London club live inside a modernist skyscraper. They did it, brilliantly, by refusing to play along.
Some interiors are interesting because of what they are. The Arts Club Dubai is interesting because of where it is, and the tension that creates.
The Arts Club is a London institution, a private members’ club founded in 1863 for figures in the arts, literature and the sciences, and for more than 160 years it has lived in a single historic townhouse in Mayfair. Dubai is its first overseas expansion in that entire history, which is a genuine event. But the truly fascinating part is the setting. Rather than recreate a Georgian townhouse, the club has installed itself across four floors and 65,000 square feet of ICD Brookfield Place, the sleek, transparent skyscraper by Foster + Partners in the Dubai International Financial Centre. A club whose whole identity is patina, warmth and history has moved into a cool glass tower defined by clarity and light.
Reconciling those two things was the design problem, and it was handed to Dimorestudio, the Milanese studio, who solved it in the most interesting way possible: not by softening the club to suit the tower, but by building a completely different world inside it.
The right studio for an impossible brief
To understand the interiors, you have to understand the studio, because Dimorestudio is one of the most distinctive names in design.
Founded by Emiliano Salci and Britt Moran, Dimorestudio is celebrated for interiors that feel like film sets: cinematic, nostalgic yet forward-looking, built on unexpected, colour-saturated palettes and bold, sometimes startling material juxtapositions. Their signature gift is the merging of past and present, rooms that feel as though they have always existed and yet could not have been made at any other moment. That is a very particular talent, and it happens to be exactly what this commission needed.
Because the challenge at ICD Brookfield Place was essentially one of smuggling. How do you carry the soul of a 19th-century London club, all heritage and eccentricity, into a 21st-century glass box that projects transparency and corporate calm? You do not argue with the tower. You build an immersive, layered, richly saturated interior world within it, one so complete that the moment you step inside, the modernist shell disappears and you are somewhere else entirely. That is precisely what Dimorestudio has done.
A journey through four different worlds
The organising idea of the interior is what Dimorestudio calls a “nonlinear narrative,” and it is the best way to experience the club.
Rather than one consistent look, the design gives each of the four floors its own identity and mood, so that moving through the club feels like moving through a sequence of connected but distinct rooms in a film, no two alike, yet all bound together by recurring motifs, materials and detailing. Art Deco is the principal key the whole thing is played in, but the studio ranges freely beyond it. The pleasure is in the progression.
It begins in an Art Deco entrance hall, where bold woods and geometric forms set the visual language and announce that this will be a place of craft and drama. On the first floor, the brasserie is defined by a boldly geometric patterned marble floor, extended by wooden floors inlaid with oversized fan motifs that spill into the adjoining spaces. Climb to the second floor and the mood shifts entirely: the Latin restaurant is staged around cathedral-like stained glass windows, custom panelling and a hand-painted mural inspired by coloured concrete tiles, a room with the hush and colour of a chapel. And on the third floor, the Italian restaurant delivers the showstopper, a triple-marble floor in a hexagonal geometric pattern answered overhead by a spectacular backlit briar wood ceiling.
Across all of it, Dimorestudio layers bold textures, rich fabrics and deep, saturated colour, so that each level is its own complete environment. This is interiors as theatre, and the club is designed to be walked through as a series of reveals.
The point of the contrast
It is worth dwelling on the deliberate clash between the building and its contents, because it is the intellectual heart of the project.
ICD Brookfield Place is Foster + Partners at their most disciplined: a glass facade, structural clarity, light-filled and open. The interiors Dimorestudio has slipped inside it are the opposite in every respect, warm, opaque, ornamental, saturated with character. That contrast is entirely intentional. Where the tower projects transparency, the club offers refuge and mystery. Where the architecture is about the future, the interior is about memory. And the collision of the two is what gives The Arts Club Dubai its identity: a timeless, old-world institution that is nonetheless unmistakably here, now, in a modern Gulf financial district. The club does not pretend the tower is not there. It uses it as a foil.
A club that is also a gallery
True to the name, art is not an accessory at The Arts Club but the reason it exists, and the design treats it accordingly.
Every space has been conceived to host both permanent and rotating collections, so that members encounter contemporary art in intimate, immersive settings rather than in a dedicated white cube bolted on at the end. This continues the London club’s long relationship with artists and collectors, and it dovetails perfectly with Dimorestudio’s own approach, since their interiors are already composed like artworks. The result is a building where the line between the design and the collection deliberately blurs: the rooms are a canvas, and the canvases are part of the rooms. Add the expansive outdoor terraces with their panoramic skyline views, making full use of Dubai’s climate and its DIFC setting, and the club becomes a genuine cultural destination rather than simply a smart place to dine.
Frequently asked questions
What is The Arts Club Dubai? The first overseas outpost of The Arts Club, the London private members’ club founded in 1863. It occupies four floors and 65,000 square feet of ICD Brookfield Place in DIFC, with restaurants, a brasserie, lounges, private dining and terraces.
Who designed the interiors? Dimorestudio, the Milan studio founded by Emiliano Salci and Britt Moran, known for cinematic, colour-saturated interiors that merge past and present.
Who designed the building? Foster + Partners, who designed ICD Brookfield Place, the glass tower in DIFC that houses the club. The contrast between the transparent building and the opulent interiors is deliberate.
What is the design concept? A “nonlinear narrative” in which each of the four floors has its own identity and mood, unified by Art Deco influences and recurring motifs, from a geometric marble brasserie to a stained-glass Latin restaurant and a briar-wood Italian dining room.
Why is it significant? It marks the first international expansion in The Arts Club’s 160-year history, and one of Dimorestudio’s most ambitious Middle East commissions.
Final thoughts
The Arts Club Dubai could have been a simple export, a London club copied and pasted into the Gulf. What makes it far more interesting is that it is a translation rather than a transplant. Dimorestudio understood that you cannot fake 160 years of accumulated character, so instead of imitating the Mayfair townhouse they conjured its spirit anew, in saturated colour and layered material, and set it deliberately against the cool glass logic of a Foster tower.
The effect is a members’ club that feels both deeply rooted and entirely of its place, a Victorian soul given a modern, Middle Eastern body. Walk up through its four floors, from the Deco hall to the briar-wood ceiling, and you are moving through one of the most confident interiors Dubai has produced, and a reminder that the richest design often comes not from harmony but from a well-judged collision. The Arts Club has waited 160 years to leave home. Dimorestudio has made the journey worth it.
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