Wild at heart
Pallavi Dean, founder and creative director of Dubai design studio Roar, straddles the intersection of three cultures. She explores this fusion in her work.
By Charles Shafaieh
At the recently opened SENSASIA Stories spa at Dubai’s Kempinski Hotel Mall of the Emirates, guests can augment their treatments with virtual-reality headsets that transport them to the Seychelles and other escapist destinations. High-tech gadgets are unnecessary, however, when the space that envelopes them already provides a transcendent experience. Designed by the Dubai-based studio Roar, founded by Pallavi Dean, the ethereal 370-square-metre flagship epitomizes Dean’s desire that interiors convey a sense of ease and holistic integrity. Its restrained yet dramatic design features a fine balance of colours and textures, with raw stone slabs and slate accents in a spectrum of greys that converse with brown vinyl floors, wooden slatted screens, and delicate copper fixtures with an anodized rose-gold finish. A cultural dialogue joins this interplay of materials, as softly illuminated arches in the male and female lobbies reference Gulf architecture as well as SENSASIA’s pan-Asian roots.
Understated cultural fusions such as this occur throughout Roar’s international projects—about 20 in development at any time—across the residential, corporate, and hospitality sectors. At Shababeek, a Lebanese restaurant in Sharjah, pieces by Vitra and other iconic European designers share a vibrant, Mediterranean-inspired space with those by Emirati artisans, joining modern furniture with traditional craftsmanship. More muted, even tranquil, the Dubai headquarters of Japanese pharmaceutical company Takeda blends a traditional Japanese aesthetic with a bold sense of place. It showcases pieces by artist Khalid Shafar which evoke traditional tatami mats, here made of local palm-tree leaves rather than rice straw.
A scientific approach to user experience, central to Dean’s commercial practice, also guided the interior design of her modern family home.
The absence of a homogeneous, single-minded aesthetic in Roar’s portfolio derives, in part, from Dean’s cosmopolitan life. Born in Mumbai to Indian parents, she came to Sharjah when she was just three months old and remained in the emirate through university. She later worked in the UK for two years and has two sons with her British husband, an economist and radio broadcaster, but points out that she uses a different immigration line from them at Heathrow Airport. “I have been caught off guard by those moments when I’ve wondered, ‘Who am I, culturally? I belong nowhere,’” she says from her home in Dubai, framed by a colour-coded, floor-to-ceiling bookcase. “In my 20s, this cultural tension was a big negative. But as I got older, I decided it was one of my biggest strengths. These three cultures symbolize who I am.” They also resonate unconsciously in her practice. “It has Western sensibilities, UAE influences, and that Indian touch of colour.”
Dean’s academic training is equally diverse. As an undergraduate at the American University of Sharjah (AUS), she first enrolled in the visual communications department. The choice was an act of rebellion for the young designer. “I didn’t want to do architecture, because everyone in my family wanted me to,” she says, smiling. Professors in her foundation year convinced her otherwise when they observed her work’s design focus, creativity, and three-dimensionality. Nevertheless, architecture didn’t retain her passion. “I was designing toilets and handrails for a whole year. I thought somebody would give me my first tower already, at 22!” she says and, with characteristic candour, admonishes her youthful arrogance. That frustration turned the self-professed “academic at heart” back to the classroom, to short courses, including set design. Interior design—“a happy medium” between these micro and macro scales—followed. She can still be found in the classroom, taking myriad courses, including photography and entrepreneurship.
Roar created the interiors for the Sharjah Research, Technology and Innovation Park on the AUS campus.
Just as her view of her multicultural background gradually changed, it took time for her to realize the value of AUS, where she also received a Master’s in Interior Design Theory and Critical Thinking. Only after a stint at London’s Architectural Association, whose alumni include Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas, did she appreciate the foundation that AUS had given her and that she measured up to, and often excelled beyond, students from anywhere. Now, as an employer, she seeks out fellow AUS graduates. “I know how rigorous their training is,” she says. “I also really value the discipline that’s inculcated in you when you come out of that school.”
Living and working outside dominant cultural centres like London or New York has additional, often unsung, benefits. “Metropolitan hubs are oversaturated sometimes, so little voices, when they’re just starting to discover the sound of their voice, get lost,” she argues. “Dubai put the UAE on the map not so long ago, and Sharjah was a sleepy fishing village no one had heard of. When you grow up in a small town, you’re always second guessing yourself. You push yourself. You strive. You’re hungry. In the end, that worked to my advantage.”
This drive has helped Gulf-based designers see themselves as experts in a region where local needs and desires cannot be satisfied by imported ideas alone. Now, with such self-confidence, these designers serve as a strong inspiration for the design world, as in 2018 when the prestigious Italian manufacturer Artemide commissioned Dean for a lighting collection. “I thought, ‘Wow, people are really looking to us and asking what kind of interesting and quirky ideas are coming out of this region’” she recalls. The result, Interweave, is unsurprisingly eclectic. Purchased as a kit, the piece invites user engagement in determining the shape of its toy-like, tubular incandescent LED light that connects through a series of matte-black aluminium pillars. These supports, which affix either to walls or ceilings, in turn provide hidden functions as speakers, motion sensors, and even perfume dispensers.
Roar’s design for the SENSASIA Stories spa conveys ease and holistic integrity. Interweave showcased the discipline and the spontaneity of Dean’s practice.
The counterpoint created by Interweave’s free-form light and its rooted pillars speaks to Roar’s unofficial motto, “50 percent wild, 50 percent tame.” For Dean, this philosophy typically manifests in her spontaneity having a disciplined—often scientific—foundation, akin to an abstract artist receiving rigorous training before they break from tradition. For example, she developed a 25-point questionnaire for assessing every project, which includes evaluating whether a design is based on academic research. Medical experts also join the design process to assess needs to which Dean and her colleagues are not instinctually attuned. “When we do a workplace, I might ask how many desks or meeting rooms the client wants,” she explains. “But our psychologist will ask, ‘How many extroverts, introverts, and ambiverts are in your office? What kind of spaces would make these people feel cocooned?’ I find that super fascinating.” During the pandemic, Roar even released two white papers, on the future of restaurant design and education spaces.
Dean’s mindfulness of these many concerns fuels rather than limits her playfulness, which is in turn grounded by her daily yoga and meditation practice. But any wildness, she adds, always must be relevant to a project’s needs. Surprising, eye-popping interiors should serve the people who interact with those spaces—a belief she regrets that architects, too often hungry for magazine covers, frequently ignore. The UAE broadly has realised this over time. Akin to her own rebellious early years, the nation’s “teenage” desire for “the biggest, fastest, and tallest architecture” is behind it, she says. In its place, an admirable, more sensitive ideology has gradually but confidently taken hold. “Instead of starting by asking, ‘What can we make that’s iconic?’ we’re thinking about the experiences we want to create for users,” she says. “The design we’ve been doing for the last 10 years—quieter, context and heritage based—doesn’t shout. It whispers.”
Top photograph: Pallavi Dean, in a two tone organza gown from Bouguessa’s Resort 19 Light and Shadow Collection. Courtesy of Bouguessa.
All other images courtesy of Roar Design Studio.
