Decor
Home decor and styling in Abu Dhabi
Decorating is the part everyone enjoys and the part that most often gets done in the wrong order. Cushions and lamps arrive before anyone has worked out where the light falls in the afternoon, or admitted that the sofa is too small for the wall it sits against. The result is a room full of nice things that does not quite hold together.
We come at it from the building side, which changes the emphasis. Arkan Interiors has worked on interiors in Abu Dhabi since 2003 and makes its own furniture, so a room that needs a table of a particular size gets one made rather than compromised on. The side tables and the marble topped pedestal table in the gallery below are ours. Styling, for us, is the last layer of a job rather than a separate service bolted on at the end.
The decisions that do the heavy lifting
Scale first. A room reads as wrong when things are the wrong size for it far more often than when they are the wrong colour. A rug that stops short of the front legs of the seating makes a sitting area look like separate pieces of furniture standing near each other. Art hung too high floats away from what it belongs to. These are measurable problems with measurable answers, which is why they get fixed quickly once someone names them.
Light, in layers. One bright ceiling fitting flattens a room and puts everyone under it. Adding a second and third source at different heights, a floor lamp, and a table lamp, gives the room somewhere to be soft in the evening. Colour temperature matters as much as brightness: warm light around 2700K reads as evening and domestic, cooler light around 4000K reads as daytime and functional, and mixing them badly in one room is unsettling in a way people feel without identifying.
Texture carries a neutral scheme. When a palette is quiet, contrast has to come from surface rather than hue. A flat weave against a boucle, matt plaster against polished stone, and the room stops looking like a showroom set. This is the part that makes calm rooms feel finished rather than unfinished.
Local conditions, honestly. Dust settles here, so deep-pile and heavily carved pieces need more upkeep than the same room would demand elsewhere. Strong sun fades textiles on the window side of a room within a year or two. Neither is a reason to avoid anything, but both are a reason to know before you buy.
Process
How we work
- 01
Start from the room you have
Light, proportion, what the room is actually used for and at what time of day. A scheme that ignores any of those looks like a showroom rather than somewhere anyone lives.
- 02
Fix the big surfaces first
Floor, walls, and window. Get those wrong and no amount of styling on top will rescue the room, which is why decor and fit-out are better handled together than in sequence.
- 03
Furniture and fabric
Scale before colour. The most common mistake in a large villa room is furniture that is individually handsome and collectively too small for the space.
- 04
The last layer
Lighting, mirrors, art, and the pieces that sit on surfaces. This is the part that reads as "decorated", and it works best when the three steps before it have already been done properly.
Gallery
From this part of our work
See the full gallery
Questions
Questions we get asked
- Do I have to replace everything?
- No, and you usually should not. Most rooms improve more from re-covering two chairs and changing the lighting than from starting again. We will tell you what is worth keeping.
- Can you work to a fixed budget?
- Yes. Tell us the number at the start rather than at the end. A budget shapes where the money goes, and the decisions are much better when it is known from the first conversation.
- Can you style around furniture I already own?
- That is a normal brief for us, and often the more interesting one. Inherited or collected pieces give a room something a single purchase never does. If a piece needs re-covering or repairing to earn its place, that work is done by our own people.
- Do you supply the furniture as well?
- We can make it. That is the main thing that separates us from a decorator: if the room needs a console of a particular length, it can be built rather than hunted for.
Related services
Next step
Tell us about your project
Send a floor plan, a photograph, or just an idea. We will tell you what it takes and what it costs.