Downtown Design, the contemporary design fair at the heart of Dubai Design Week, runs from November 4 to 8 at Dubai Design District (d3). More than 300 brands and designers from over 35 countries are taking part. Alongside international names such as Venini and Jaipur Rugs, Iwan Maktabi is showing new work by UAE-based designers Nadine Kanso and Omar Al Gurg, while fellows from MAKE’s Athath programme in Abu Dhabi are bringing their furniture prototypes to the fair.

Our contributor Martin Lezhenin spent opening day talking to the people behind the stands. Here, he shares what caught his eye and what those conversations revealed about doing business in Dubai.

It all begins a little unusually. Approaching Dubai Design District, I remember the invitation did mention a new location for this year’s pavilion. A small U-turn, and eventually I found my way to the 12th edition of Downtown Design, barely out of breath and with my shoes more or less intact.

It is a curious feeling, how so little and so much can change at the same time. And that slight disconnect seems to be shared by quite a few people here. Everyone is pleased to return to something familiar, even if the world around it has become considerably less so.

What Downtown Design director Mette Degn-Christensen politely calls a “not so collaborative international supply chain” has had a much wider effect on how designers, studios and businesses in the UAE grow, exhibit and develop. You start to see it as you walk around.

At the press breakfast, Natasha Carella, Director of Dubai Design Week, explains that the festival has usually avoided a grand slogan or overarching statement because it “felt a bit arbitrary”. This year, however, there is one — the ways we gather, interact and live together – a broad brief that leaves room for exhibitors to develop narratives of their own.

And you can feel it. In the closer relationships between businesses and creative practitioners, in the way new circumstances are making local studios reconsider who they are working for, and in the growing confidence with which those studios are developing a design language of their own.

The fair’s 12th edition broadly retains its familiar outlines, with more than 300 brands, designers, studios and companies exhibiting under the pavilion’s roof. Some, like Venini, return with displays familiar from previous years. Others, like Jaipur Rugs, surprise me once again with inventive, playful collaborations – this time with Richard Hutten and Bodour Al Qasimi. The place feels fresh. As Mette puts it, they are “shaking a bag a little bit” this year, adding colour, imagination and a sense of something holding it all together.

One of the brightest examples is right by the entrance. HMA Living’s Memphis Milano display brings together a collection of design icons, some now several decades old, that still make you want to take them home with the enthusiasm of someone seeing them for the first time.

The exhibits cover quite a range, from zebra-print toilets by Roberto Cavalli to Riphean Story, a company from deep within Russia that describes itself as the world’s only supplier of stromatolitic stone at architectural scale.

There is also plenty of lovely tilework this year. Alongside the familiar Portuguese favourites from New Terracotta, there are now UAE-based Slō and Biscuit bring equally intriguing offerings. The latter are working with locally produced pieces in all shapes and sizes and creating spaces using recycled and sustainable materials.

Some stands make you wonder what sort of brief might bring you to them. It is a good question to put to the person on the stand, and you get the sense that figuring out what happens next is part of the reason they are here.

Local design practices and initiatives receive plenty of attention, too. My favourites include Athath Fellowship which brings a particularly strong furniture collection, while Tasmeem and Tanween Spaces by Tashkeel explore materials including date seeds and ghaf wood — according to the team, they are the only ones allowed to work with it! 

There are, of course, straightforward commercial stands, where the product does most of the talking. But across much of the fair, exhibitors have thought about what they want visitors to take away beyond a catalogue. Materials, layout and the way objects are placed together help tell a story about the company and how it sees its work — and Kohler is among the best examples of combining a strong product with a bold presentation.

Having made my way around and spoken to more than fifty exhibitors, I am pleasantly surprised. For most, business this year seems to be going reasonably well, if not positively well, with logistics the most frequently mentioned complication. There are exceptions, naturally. One of the stands (let’s not compromise them) had to be completely redesigned six weeks before the fair because some of its essential components could no longer make it to Dubai.

For me, of course, the most interesting part is not what happens at the stand itself. This is not, after all, a transactional fair where people simply take products off a shelf. What matters far more is what happens afterwards. As Mette acknowledges, the horizon they focus on is six months to a year after the fair, since that is typically when the key deals and decisions take place. Many companies use Downtown Design as a testing ground for entering the market – starting with a small stand, returning with a larger presence, and eventually organising independent events of their own.

However much the market, the circumstances, the major players or the planet might change, one thing remains reassuringly constant for me — my final, and favourite, stand at the fair, the Veuve Clicquot bar. This year, even that has had a makeover, with Chasing the Sun created in collaboration with Yinka Ilori.

Here, I think, I can come to terms with all the changes.

Downtown Design runs from November 4 to 8 at Dubai Design District, with d3 as strategic partner and Dubai Culture as lead supporter.