FROM (75)007 TO THE RED SAND DESERT
Moving to Dubai in your early twenties sounds like a fantasy to most people. But when you've been raised inside the cultural inheritance of Paris — museums treated like second homes, afternoons disappearing inside galleries, long walks with no destination except whatever hidden street or tiny café you accidentally discover — the fantasy starts to fracture a little.
I grew up with a very European rhythm of living. Wandering for hours through the city just because the light looked good that day. Getting lost on purpose. Stumbling into hidden courtyards, independent bookstores, strange little exhibitions behind anonymous doors. Afternoons spent walking through Saint-Germain, or escaping into quieter corners like the gardens behind the Petit Palais, where everything suddenly feels suspended in time. Sitting in the courtyard of Fabula after wandering through the museum, spending an hour at Musée Rodin, walking through the sculpture garden while the noise of the city disappeared behind the hedges. And then the complete opposite energy at Centre Pompidou or Bourse de Commerce, spaces where contemporary art, fashion, architecture, and design culture collide effortlessly.
And maybe the sweetest part of the day was coming back home to my apartment in the 7ème arrondissement after hours of wandering through the city. Exposed wooden beams, soft afternoon light, that effortless Parisian chic. Fashion books, architecture monographs, and art editions left behind by my landlady stacked carelessly around the apartment, making the space feel less like a rental and more like a lived-in editorial set.
Living in the 7ème naturally slowed everything down — mornings lasted longer, afternoons stretched endlessly, and even the smallest rituals started to feel intentional. Paris teaches you that life happens slowly. That beauty is usually hidden somewhere between two streets you weren't planning to take.
Dubai was the opposite frequency. Faster. Shinier. A city built to impress you immediately instead of revealing itself over time. And maybe that's what made the move feel so disorienting at first — like stepping out of an old European film and directly into fluorescent light.
The only way I could survive Dubai was by pretending, at first, that I lived somewhere else. I like Dubai when it looks like Singapore.
There are corners of Dubai that remind me of Singapore — clean lines, humid evenings, glass reflecting palm trees, a certain quiet futurism that makes the city feel softer than it wants to admit.
Singapore never felt real to me in the first place. It felt engineered by someone obsessed with the future but still emotionally attached to nature. Like an Avatar version of a city. Everywhere you look there's green swallowing architecture whole — enormous tropical trees stretching above highways, plants dripping from hotel terraces, entire buildings disappearing behind vertical gardens. You walk through it feeling slightly detached from reality, like you've accidentally entered some parallel dimension where cities evolved differently.
And maybe that's why certain parts of Dubai started comforting me. The hidden gardens around DIFC. The entrance to Ninive especially — overwhelmed with greenery, dense plants climbing around the pathway, palm leaves swallowing the light while enormous glass skyscrapers rise behind it. Completely typical Dubai in the distance, but the actual entrance feels like Singapore somehow slipped into the city unnoticed. The quiet greenery around Gate Village late at night. The shaded pathways near Alserkal Avenue where trees and concrete almost manage to coexist naturally.
I couldn't have survived Dubai without Alserkal Avenue. Yes, I like DIFC too, and there's still nothing quite like Shimmers by the beach, the Burj Al Arab glowing in the distance. Warm summer nights. Watermelon salad. Cocktails sweating onto white tables while the waves fold into the shore and Arabic music drifts through the heat. And you can't skip Duomo near the Burj Khalifa — Dubai in its most theatrical form, but executed so beautifully you almost surrender to it completely. This is architectural storytelling. The scale of the space feels unreal at first. Enormous cathedral-like ceilings, dramatic chandeliers suspended impossibly high above the dining room, marble surfaces glowing under soft amber light. Everything is oversized, intentionally designed to leave you slightly overwhelmed. The atmosphere of excess done with precision. The space that feels operatic. Waiters moving through shadows, champagne glasses catching reflections from the chandeliers, the skyline outside dissolving into darkness while the entire interior glows gold. It's the kind of place that reminds you Dubai understands spectacle better than almost any city in the world and a true definition of bespoke interior design.
And maybe that's why I always returned to Alserkal Avenue afterwards. Because beyond all the spectacle, beyond the chandeliers and impossible skylines, Alserkal feels like the rawest version of Dubai — quieter, dustier, more introspective. A place where the city stops performing for a moment and simply exists. An industrial compound transformed into the city's art district — raw concrete warehouses turned galleries, concept stores, design studios, independent cinemas, cafés filled with architects pretending not to be architects. It feels accidental in the best possible way, which in Dubai is rare. A place where design breathes a little slower. Where conversations about typography, fashion, architecture, and photography blur together under brutalist ceilings and soft desert light.
What I loved most about Alserkal was that it interrupts the version of Dubai people expect. You leave behind marble hotel lobbies, polished luxury boutiques, valet parking everywhere, and suddenly you're inside something quieter, more intellectual, almost intentionally unfinished. Cement floors. Oversized industrial doors. Light moving slowly across empty gallery walls. Sculptural interiors that blur the line between art and spatial design.
And maybe that's why it became addictive to me. Because in the middle of a city obsessed with spectacle, Alserkal is obsessed with atmosphere.
Even the restaurants feel curated differently there. Le Guepard doesn't feel like a Dubai restaurant at all. It feels cinematic. Nothing screams for attention, which immediately makes it luxurious in a completely different way from the rest of the city.
Al Quoz, the industrial neighbourhood where Alserkal Avenue is hidden, was never designed to be beautiful. But over time artists, designers, filmmakers, architects started occupying the empty spaces, and now the entire area carries this strange creative tension between industry and art. It feels discovered rather than manufactured, which gives it an energy almost impossible to replicate artificially.
There may be something faintly European about Alserkal Avenue — the galleries, the café culture, the slow wandering between design spaces and bookstores — but no one can deny the authenticity of it. Because Al Quoz is still deeply tied to the roots of Dubai. Industrial, dusty, imperfect. And somewhere inside that contrast is what ultimately made me fall in love with the city itself: the red sand desert.
You step into Alserkal's Ganache Chocolatier and the interior feels almost sculpted from sand itself — curved walls in warm clay tones, muted lighting suspended like small lanterns floating in desert air, textures that resemble wind moving across dunes. Nothing sharp, nothing excessive. The architecture feels softened deliberately, as if the entire space has been shaped slowly by heat and time rather than design trends.
And that's what makes it feel distinctly Dubai to me. Alserkal never completely disconnects from where it is. The desert still appears in the materials, the colours, the silence of certain interiors. In the way light moves across textured walls. In the earth-toned minimalism that feels impossible to separate from the Gulf itself.
Places like Ganache, or La Nena Coffee, a place that carries that same emotional language of design, don't romanticise Dubai in the obvious way. They reference something older and quieter — the red sand desert.
The desert is Dubai at its most honest — stripped of glass towers and performance. The dunes look sculpted rather than natural, like an installation endlessly reshaped by the wind. Terracotta, burnt orange, dusty rose, shadows turning mauve just before dark. Everything reduced to texture, curve, and light. No decoration. No excess. Just silence and form. The kind of landscape that makes every luxury interior in the city suddenly make sense: the linen tones, the travertine, the sandy palettes, the obsession with organic materials and curved edges.
The desert was always the reference point. Dubai just built mirrors around it.