EE54 Majlis 2025
Where the story starts
The show didn't start in the grandstand. It started at arrival.
For EE54 at Zayed National Museum, we were asked to create three distinct majlis environments – for Leadership, for Sheikhas, for Invited Guests – to receive the country’s most important audience before the ceremony began.
The brief was simple to say and hard to get right: make the wait feel like part of the occasion, not before it.
Each majlis was built to feel open, light and connected to the museum around it. We kept the ceilings free, so guests caught glimpses of Zayed National Museum’s architecture from inside the space – a continuity that carried straight through into the ceremony itself.
Materials paired heritage with refinement: layered textures, indigenous planting, tonal palettes that echoed the land rather than announced themselves.
We avoided rigid layouts. Guests moved intuitively between hospitality, retail and discovery – browsing curated pieces from Emirati makers, resting in generous seating, catching a scent or a sound that hinted at what was coming.
A tyre-track feature under glass referenced the ceremony’s opening image of Sheikh Zayed driving through the desert – a small detail that gave the whole room a sense of presence.
Elsewhere, archival photographs shifted from black and white into colour, and the Maenega installation used scent and botanicals to bring a sense of comfort into a formal welcome.
Guests moved freely between hospitality, discovery and retail from Emirati makers, paced deliberately toward the sunken grandstand.
Retail engagement rose against previous years. Leadership feedback was unanimous: the welcome felt calm, dignified, and unmistakably of this place.
