The Zayed National Museum becomes a stage for the UAE’s design voices

Over the past decade, the UAE has worked hard to cultivate and support a homegrown design culture – an ambition reflected in the newly unveiled Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi, where interiors led by Agata Kurzela Studio bring together Emirati designers, makers and artists whose work is woven into the museum’s spatial identity.

Designed by Foster + Partners, the museum sits at the centre of the Saadiyat Cultural District and is dedicated to the life and legacy of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, known as the Father of the Nation for his role in forming the United Arab Emirates. Its sculptural roof structures, inspired by the wing of a falcon in flight, rise above a series of galleries, public spaces and research facilities intended to tell the story of the nation’s history, culture and environment.

Dubai-based design firm Agata Kurzela Studio was tasked with shaping a constellation of interiors within this monumental building, including majlis meeting rooms, hospitality areas, a public atrium and a research library. Kurzela, a Polish-born architect and interior designer who founded her practice in 2020, has worked extensively across the region, building a reputation for creating quietly dramatic interiors that combine a restrained palette with unexpected sometimes subversive material choices – the chain curtain she used to enclose a prayer room within her design for an Emirati government bureau in Abu Dhabi is just one example.

At the Zayed National Museum, she takes a similarly nuanced approach, adding depth to a sand-coloured palette with tactile local materials including wool, rope, ceramic, camel leather and metal.

Across the project, Kurzela assembled a group of Emirati designers and artists whose work helps shape each space. Furniture by designers including Aljoud Lootah, known for her ability to reinterpret traditional forms into new contexts, and Omar Al Gurg, founder of Dubai-based design studio Modu Method, sits alongside pieces by Emirati visual artist Latifa Saeed and Emirati architect Abdalla Al Mulla. Lighting by local design brand Khalid Shafar, designer Alya Al Ghefeli and interior architect Roudha Al Shamsi adds further layers, while textiles and carpets reference regional craft traditions.

Several spaces take their cues from the Al Durour calendar, a traditional Emirati system that divides the year into seasonal phases. Meeting rooms and majlises ('majlis' is an Arabic term meaning ‘sitting room’) translate these shifts into colour, texture and atmosphere, creating a design language loosely rooted in the rhythms of desert climate.

The result is an interior landscape in which cultural references are not presented as artefacts behind glass, but embedded within the spaces themselves – in the materials, objects and collaborations that shape how the museum is experienced.