Meet the Rising Stars of Dubai’s Eclectic Interior Design Scene

Marco Maximus

Marco Maximus, 31, trained as an architect, but he has often been drawn to a broad range of style and design disciplines and artforms, from architecture and inside design, to branding and product or service design. “Since I was youthful, I loved structure in all its styles. I was fond of branding—creating a story, doing the job on new concepts that can be represented in numerous shapes,” he stated. 

Born in Egypt, he researched architecture at the College of Cairo, enterprise a wide class that gave him a flavor of a number of disciplines. “I discovered how to consider of everything—urbanism, landscaping, visualizing, drawing, painting, as perfectly as interior design—not just to be an architect,” he claimed.

Following graduating, he worked as an architect and inside designer in Abu Dhabi, before going to Dubai in 2018. Since 2019, he has worked at Kristina Zanic Layout Consultants, a Dubai-centered agency with an international outlook and clientele, in which he is currently a senior interior designer.

“I use my complete toolkit—my structure and presentation abilities, even my video editing—to produce concepts for my styles,” he mentioned. “It’s totally distinctive operating in Dubai then working back home simply because of the range. In our place of work we have nearly 30 various nationalities and I have been lucky adequate to work in Montenegro and Cyprus and Serbia, also in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain—very assorted nations and with very diverse higher-end customers.”

At the moment, Mr. Maximus will work largely in the resort sector, building higher-end interiors for five-star boutique and chain hotels, but he is also passionate about merchandise layout and has won multiple awards for his household furniture models. In 2020, he received a competition to layout a mounting plate for AXOR x SARA Team in celebration of Saudi heritage, developing a sleek modern day translation of standard Sadu styles laser carved into a brushed crimson-gold steel end.

Past 12 months, he gained an award for Flocean, a unique curved sunlight-lounger designed in collaboration with Amr Abdelaziz, a colleague at Kristina Zanic Style and design Consultants. 

Made to raise consciousness of how trash is polluting oceans, the lounger is created from squander like one-use visors, gloves and facemasks, which contain plastics including polypyrene and choose 450 several years to biodegrade. The pair made the lounger for charity Surge for Water’s Sustainability Design and style Awards, building a one of a kind use for the billions of solitary-use health care supplies discarded in the course of the pandemic.

Just as he pushes himself to make unique item layouts, Mr. Maximus doesn’t choose the straightforward route when it arrives to interiors. “I like to be challenged. When every thing thinks, ‘This is not going to work’ or ‘It’s a extremely small timeline,’ this is what will make me pretty enthusiastic to get the job done,” he reported. “I’m quite fond of doing the job on restorations and refurbishments. It is a little something that not everyone likes but it’s one thing that I believe is very appealing due to the fact you have a entire historical past of a building—sometimes you require to hold it and often you want to occur up with some thing thoroughly distinct and absolutely new. You can see the change with your own eyes.”