Nikki Beach Resort & Spa Dubai, designed by Gregory Gatserelia, is a new luxury beach resort on the Pearl Jumeira that brings an unexpected sense of design to the Middle East’s luxury hospitality market. The resort is recognizably Nikki Beach, yet also markedly unique. The brand’s characteristic white color scheme and emphasis on the way of coexisting with unexpected organic influences and reinterpreted spaces in this development inspired by its own beautiful private coastline.
White Walls, Concrete Floors, and Rough, Natural Wood Create a Design Flow Throughout the Resort
Understated luxury breaks the codes of international flavor in the individual areas of the resort: the hotel, the villas, the residences, and the Nikki Beach Dubai Restaurant & Beach Club. Even though each area serves its own purpose, a constant flow is maintained between them, rendering the resort a coherent, holistic entity. White walls, concrete floors, and rough, natural wood, and mirrors are the carriers of this flow throughout the resort, creating a new experience in each area yet maintaining a sense of intelligent homogeny that is subtle without being repetitive.
Hotel Lobby Is a Destination in Itself
The lobby of the hotel is an exemplification of the rethinking of design that characterizes the resort as a whole. Far from a liminal space of transitions and fleeting encounters, the lobby is a destination in itself. A high-energy location with artistic sculptural elements, the lobby, with its bar and luxurious seating area, is the perfect introduction to the resort as a whole and the dream vacation that it promises to all who visit. The undulating form of the white ceiling engages in a fluidity that is reprised by free-form wooden benches and muted soft furniture.
In the 117 hotel rooms and suites, 15 villas, and 63 lifestyle residences, this flow takes part in a dialogue between form and function. Reinventing the articulation of these living spaces, adding subtle hues of blue, and reimagining the roles of otherwise overlooked hotel room features, all whilst offering unrivaled views over the Arabian Gulf and Dubai skyline, gives guests a generous and unique hospitality experience.
The Interaction Between Indoor and Outdoor Spaces
The Nikki Beach Dubai Restaurant & Beach Club is the resort’s entertainment hub, uniting an outdoor beach area with a restaurant and VIP nightclub. Gregory Gatserelia’s innovative state-of-the-art ceiling feature in the VIP club, with over ten thousand aluminum fins and LED lights, brings the night sky indoors. The interaction between indoor and outdoor spaces is also enacted in the restaurant, through the key design elements of the resort. Natural wood ceiling installations and grey Carrera marble turned ocean-blue by natural sand-blasting complement the view of the beach seen through floor-to-ceiling windows, creating a nature-conscious environment.
The modern Floridian cuisine of Key West, which will be officially opened in late 2017, is served in an environment that blends the aesthetic features of the resort’s design scheme. The famous white walls typical of Nikki Beach are reinterpreted as individually bleached and painted white planks of wood that cover the restaurant’s walls and ceiling. Gregory Gatserelia’s choice of modern concrete flooring and a marble bar countertop creates a coherent space that both recalls the other areas of the resort and is specifically matched to the style of the residences, where this restaurant is found.
Gregory Gatserelia Combines Nature, Art, and Design in This Project
Café Nikki is the resort’s breakfast location and all-day urban bistro. The curving wood of the lobby becomes floor-to-ceiling sculptural statement cabinets that punctuate the space looking out over the resort. The dark concrete floor is paralleled by a ceiling of paneled driftwood tinted blue by an organic beach process. Bringing this natural process indoors and re-appropriating adapting the evolution of a material as a positive design point exemplifies how Gregory Gatserelia combines nature, art, and design in this project.
“I always keep art at the heart of my designs, and privilege sensory experience,” says Mr. Gatserelia, “and the Nikki Beach Resort & Spa Dubai is no different. The real goal here was to take an established and recognizable brand with which I have done much work, and show it in a slightly different perspective. Bringing the beach, the sea, and the sky indoors has allowed us to enter into a dialogue between nature and design. This, along with the sculptural elements that are found throughout the resort’s different areas, has resulted in a subtle continuation of the Nikki Beach style that makes this not only a holiday location but a notable artistic exploration.”
Developers: Meraas
Lead Consultants: DSA Architects
Interior Designer: Gatserelia Design
Gatserelia Design
Gatserelia Design, founded by Gregory and Alexander Gatserelia in 1985, is an international team of architects, designers, landscape architects, and consultants. Since the beginning, the company has grown into a well-reputed, trendsetting agency in the world of design, consistently innovating across a variety of different interiors. The company thinks of design as a tool to enrich people’s lives and help organizations succeed. They believe in balancing interiors with the right dose of functionality and beauty, imagining solutions for the most challenging of environments and projects.
Gatserelia Design transforms concrete surroundings into surreal, highly sensational environments, striving for renewal, reinvention, and continual evolution in design.
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