The Ethereal Space between the Earth and Stars

This is the concept I was commissioned to create for an Arabian Oud company office in London. The company is one of the largest perfume producers in the Middle East. The brief was to develop a concept and design for their new retail space in Westfield Shopping Centre, Stratford City, London, within a very tight deadline.

The challenge was to capture the spirit of Middle Eastern culture in an imaginative, poetic way and fuse it with the world of fragrance, translated into a contemporary Western retail environment.

The final concept is based on the eternity and lightness of fragrance, set within a universe-like space between the earth and the stars. The actual space features matte dark walls with back‑lit, dark wood‑framed panels, and fine sand‑textured paint covering dune‑shaped surfaces illuminated with complementary ambient light. Along with a distressed antique gold panel and a large framed lighting panel positioned opposite the entrance—the focal point of the space—these elements display fragrance bottles on illuminated glass discs.

Three floating golden metal lines above the glass discs represent wavy dunes emerging from the desert‑sand surface of the panels. At the centre of the floor stands a custom perfume display made of glass and wood. The glass box is filled with sand, arranged in a direction opposite to the shaped wooden side panels, while the top glass panel features a precise wave‑form laser‑cut engraving illuminated along its inner edges. Within the sand lies a half‑buried antique Arabic vase.

Suspended from the ceiling is a large grid of distressed gold‑painted Islamic‑patterned stars, through which the entire space is ambiently lit, creating an ethereal and tranquil atmosphere.