Dubai-Based Abdalla Almulla is a Cartographer of Cultural Resonance

Dubai’s skyline pulses with audacious shapes, but UAE designer Abdalla Almulla’s most resonant designs often touch the earth. Walk through The Palm Pavilion - a structure of woven palm fronds, trunk columns, and parametric ceilings - and you feel the ghost of Sheikh Zayed himself, who once sat on such mats under palm canopies. "We used one tree to create everything," Almulla, founder of MULA Design Practice, tells SceneHome. “Flooring, structure, shade, even the furniture inside. It’s about less resources creating more meaning." This pavilion, born for COP28, later migrated across the Emirates - a nomadic testament to design that honours roots while embracing reinvention.

For Almulla, the blank page is an invitation to wrestle with the unspoken. "Pavilions demand you ask a radical question," he reflects, his voice alive with the energy of a solver, fuelled by challenges. "Not how to build, but why." Where commercial architecture often prioritises safety and convention, the pavilion becomes his laboratory; a space where constraints ignite invention, not inhibit it, giving him the license to flirt with the improbable whilst unburdened by permanent occupancy codes or rigid client mandates.

To understand how such a structure came to be, you have to rewind to the quiet obsessions and turning points that shaped Almulla’s trajectory. The designer’s path defies the archetype of the architect-hero. He didn’t build Lego empires as a child; graphic design tutorials captivated him first. Architecture emerged as a bridge between engineering pragmatism and creative yearning. His pivotal moment arrived in revelation during his thesis: an 800-metre musala (prayer space) suspended above Dubai. "I realised I wasn’t just designing for the divine, but with it," he shares. "That shifted everything. Now, every project begins with a feeling - sacredness, earthiness, reflection - and materials follow."

This ethos demands profound humility. He speaks of "putting ego aside" when a client requests something "instagrammable," or when a cherished design element obstructs function. "You must understand why you are attached to something as a designer," he insists, "then reapplying its essence more truthfully." He opened his studio, MULA Design Practice, in 2018. It operates as a design practice - rather than an architecture studio - to maintain fluidity across scales. "A building, a chair, a fork - they’re all designed experiences. The ability to go all the way through from exteriors to interiors allows you to create the experience in a much deeper way."

Almulla’s designs span pavilions, houses, exhibitions, interventions - but what he’s building, more broadly, is a practice of care. His spaces are minimal, but not mute. He’ll pare things back until only the meaningful remains: a brass hinge, a cut of local stone, a shadow that lands just right on a textured wall. The restraint is a mode of respect for the place, for the craft, for the people who’ll eventually inhabit it.

In his hands, repetition becomes ritual. Fascinated with motifs and repetitions, probably due to his previous flirtations with graphic design, patterns ripple across ceilings, fractal-like screens filter desert light. "Geometry is our cultural mathematics, it’s not ornamentation. It’s identity made tactile - a rhythm that guides the eye and soul." Where minimalism risks sterility, Abdalla’s geometries pulse with contextual memory. He selects materials like a poet choosing words: polished stone for serenity, raw clay for groundedness, always attuned to Dubai’s searing heat and light, always attuned to what the space needs, for him material comes second, feeling always comes first.

He designs frameworks, allowing the moments to follow. "You can’t design the moment a child slides down a handrail or hides under stairs to cry," he says, recalling a professor’s wisdom. "Spaces must breathe, allowing people to imprint them with their own memories." This acceptance of the unexpected fuels his critique of soulless urban sprawl. "When districts lose identity, they lose timelessness. Sustainability is cultural endurance, being able to withstand the test of time."

At the heart of Almulla’s practice is a deep comfort with contrast: past and future, digital and tactile, individual and collaborative. This is someone who speaks just as reverently about the potential of CNC machines as he does about the inherited logic of a traditional fishing net. He talks about sustainability, not as a posture but as a material instinct.

Iteration is something he returns to often. “You don’t always get it right on the first go,” he says. “But you learn something. Maybe even learn what you meant to say all along.” He sketches by hand. He builds models. He renders in 3D. He 3D-prints test pieces. And sometimes, he scraps it all and begins again. There’s grace in his willingness to let the idea be smarter than the ego—in a real willingness to let the idea be smarter than the ego. To let the project win.

Abdalla wields technology not as a disruptor, but as a translator of heritage. Digital fabrication allows palm wood to span 14-metre cantilevers. 3D printing prototypes complex joints inspired by historic crafts. He recounts a project he admired, where sensors captured a carpet maker’s net-weaving gestures, transmuting them into robotic ink drawings on carpet: "That’s the alchemy, honouring the hand’s wisdom through the machine’s precision." For Abdalla, tools like CNC routers or projection-mapped floor plans are collaborators, expanding possibility while demanding rigor. "Iterations exhaust solutions. You see 10 paths, then choose the one that serves the feeling best."

Though private residences fill his portfolio, Almulla’s gaze shifts toward the communal. He dreams of museums, hospitals, fire stations - spaces where his ethos of emotional clarity and cultural resonance can touch multitudes. "Public projects leave imprints on the civic soul," he muses. In a world racing toward the new, Almulla walks patiently between eras; his designs quiet bridges where heritage and innovation, precision and humanity, find uncommon harmony.