The Studio

A studio that learned to build from the boatbuilders.

We began in a borrowed corner of a Wakrah boatyard, watching craftsmen bend teak by feel. That patience became the practice.

Dhow Design opened in 2011, founded by two architects who had trained abroad and come home certain that the Gulf coast already knew how to build for itself. The old coral houses stayed cool without machines; the dhows were engineered by eye. We wanted to design in that lineage, not against it.

Thirteen years later the practice is eight people and forty-seven finished buildings, from a single majlis to a restored boatyard. We still keep a bench of samples by the door and still ask the same first question of every site: which way does the breeze come from?

What we hold to

Cool without machines

Shade, mass, and cross-breeze do the work first; air conditioning only finishes it. A building should be comfortable with the power off.

Local hands

We build with the region’s craftspeople — stone masons, plasterers, and rope weavers — and design details that give them real work.

The sea is a neighbour

We build to protect the shoreline we borrow — no building of ours takes the public’s view or the public’s path to the water.

Patience over speed

Lime cures slowly, teak bends slowly, good detailing is drawn slowly. We quote honest timelines and keep them.

The studio

Hessa Al Kuwari

Principal · Co-founder

Omar Al Ansari