100 million visitors every year, 1,200 shops, 200 restaurants, over 10,000 parking spots, record-breaking attractions as the aquarium with 30,000 exotic fish, an in-house hotel, entire thematic “neighborhoods” such as souk and Chinatown, a 26-screen experiential cinema, an underwater zoo, banks, supermarkets, post offices, medical, sports and religious centers, and an Olympic-size ice rink… certainly, no one can say that the Dubai Mall is “just” a shopping mall.

With over 1 million square meters – the equivalent of 200 soccer fields – is one of the most visited places on earth (even more than Niagara Falls) for its ability of coalesce shopping and entertainment but also services, sports, and public spaces.

The Dubai Mall represents the urban and social model of the future, and an important subject for anthropological reflection. Here the man-made environment prevails over the roughness of nature. Luxury and fast food, family entertainment, tourist attractions and services to citizens are democratically blended in the admixture of shopping and services, all under the same (huge) roof.

It’s hard to impress in a place like Dubai, where the record-breaking attitude becomes a business and communication priority. Yet Tiffany succeeded, with the redesign of its flagship store at the Dubai Mall: an innovative, refined, and sustainable retail project.

While the Dubai Mall is growing more and more every year and luxury brands are cyclically moving their stores in newer areas, Tiffany chose to undergo the most sustainable restyling of its existing store, located at the entrance of the Grand Atrium, in the jewelers’ Avenue. A radical restyling, both in its form and concepts, which aims at integrating architecture, design, craftmanship, and art, as Anthony Ledru, CEO at Tiffany, points out, “As for the Landmark in New York, also in Dubai Tiffany wants to represent in its stores both its centennial history and the new contemporary scenarios, the past and the future, connecting together the identity of the brand to that of Dubai.”

Alexandre Arnault, Executive Vice President of Product and Communication, is also convinced of this. He believes the store “is a clever remix of past, present and future. For us, this means creating culture. I think it’s really a new era for us.”

The American dream of Tiffany, the brand that has represented American luxury since 1837, mixed with the genius loci of the Emirate's capital, contributes to the evolution of the retail concept from a commercial space to a cultural and artistic one.

Among the most interesting aspects of the Dubai Mall flagship store, there is the choral collaboration of talents and disciplines lead to a new vision of retail: the store is conceived as a whole work of art, where architecture, art, indoor interior design, and craftmanship interact in harmony to move and wonder the clients. For the Tiffany Creative Studio, the inhouse design studio that curated the entire project, design is the common thread that unifies material and experiential aspects, a time machine that connects Tiffany’s centennial history and the new contemporary circumstances.

Tiffany, after all, has always believed in design, to the point of publicly cite its designers ever since the 1950s and, yesterday as today, design represents one of the pillars of the brand.

After the recently inaugurated landmark of New York, the one in Dubai is the second store where Tiffany is experimenting with arts as the origin of experiences: Sanaa designed the façade; the excellent multidisciplinary Tiffany Creative Studio team worked on the indoor spaces, involving artists such as Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, and Rashid Johnson, and designers such as the visionary Peter Marino, who also contributed to the Landmark in New York, and the sophisticated Humberto Campana, who created unique works and objects, and artisans such as Atelier Tollis, who together with Molteni’s craftsmen elevated furniture and finishes to art.

Tiffany shows that stores do not only represent a place of sale, but they can, they must, encompass the rituals and languages of today, and convey the brand’s values through the experience design: experiences that are artistic, cultural, semantic, and aesthetic. It’s from experiences that emotions are born.

And the experience starts from the facade, which represents a visual reference point among the anonymous avenues of the mall – its kaleidoscope of shimmering reflections is truly magnetic. With its usual refined lightness, Sanaa transformed a diamond into a shining architecture. The input of the project was precisely Tiffany’s diamonds, which with their geometrical purity and luminous magic, were a powerful source of inspiration for the artists. “When we first discussed ideas for the façade at Tiffany's Dubai store, we started by studying the history of Tiffany & Co. We learned how vital diamonds are to the company and how they influenced Tiffany's famous Bird on the Rock design. We discovered how essential nature, flowers, and movement were to that work's composition, so we focused on diamonds and movement as we designed the façade.”

The façade, made of over 15,000 pure crystal cubes suspended in a mirrored aluminum structure, created a dynamic movement, a wave of shiny reflexes that catch the visitors’ eyes. Their arrangement, which is irregular only in appearance, is the result of millimetric design, a study to the smallest detail, and a visionary engineering that allowed the creation of this unique jewel.

Passing through Sanaa’s stunning façade, we enter the interiors, divided into four thematic areas: the first is the World of Icons, dedicated to the brand’s icons, the second is the All About Love, where Tiffany’s famous diamonds make any love story shine. The third is the High Jewellery, which hosts masterpieces of fine jewelry, and the fourth is the Designer Gallery, which houses jewels designed by Elsa Peretti, who revolutionized the way of conceiving and wearing jewels with her geometrical shapes and disruptive charge and transformed them from investment to accessory, bringing them to women all over the world. 

In the first room, Tiffany’s pioneering spirit and its connection to America pervades the air, the materials, and the shapes. Examples are the furnishings in selenite, an American stone whose sophisticated iridescence is enhanced by the brass metal elements, which echo the sleek lines of the Art Deco skyscrapers. Similarly, the ceilings and tables in Peretti's room are inspired by the sinuous, naturalistic forms of her jewelry, in particular by the Bean collection, as are the gilded panels in the second room that were inspired by Peretti's Mesh and the chiaroscuro of the Arab culture.

Every room here was designed to bring together traditionally distant worlds: the global and the local, the past and the future, art and business, with the goal of demonstrating that beauty and quality are universal languages. And in this new idea of retail, Tiffany manages to balance opposites in a harmonious way. The Dubai store pays homage to both the brand's 100-year history and to location housing it: alcoves of pink marble from Portugal, whose gradation hues mirror the desert sunsets while the sofas below, an anomaly in traditional jewelry retail, were intended to accommodate families. In fact Tiffany is all about hospitality, and proof of this is the imminent opening of the Tiffany Café, which will open in September, and it will make customers’ and visitors' experience in Dubai even more memorable.

In a field such as luxury, which is traditionally and conceptually resistant to change, Tiffany’s flagship store in Dubai represents an evolution in the concept of retail and design of commercial spaces for its ability to represent a destination rather than a store and have managed to include tradition and contemporary scenarios, the brand’s DNA and the genius loci, an holistic experience of the arts and the ability of design of bringing places, products, and experiences together. 

By Alba Cappellieri, Politecnico di Milano

All photos courtesy Tiffany&Co.