The question we are asked most often about our Shanghai headquarters is logistical: how does a workshop in China serve a villa in Dubai? The answer is simpler than it appears. Joinery is produced in Shanghai, crated, shipped by air or sea, and installed by our own team in Dubai. The transit adds ten to fourteen days to the programme. The quality adds something that cannot be replicated locally.
Our Shanghai atelier employs more than ten full-time joiners — cabinet-makers, veneerers, lacquer finishers, and metal-inlay specialists. They work from drawings produced by our designers, to tolerances that most Dubai fit-out contractors cannot match. A wardrobe door that closes with a whisper. A kitchen drawer that opens on concealed runners without a handle. A library shelf that meets the wall with a shadow gap so precise it looks like a single piece of stone.
The atelier's value is not just execution. It is prototyping. Before any piece of joinery ships to Dubai, a full-scale prototype is built in Shanghai. The designer flies in, inspects the prototype, tests the mechanisms, checks the veneer match, and signs off. If the prototype is wrong — and prototypes are sometimes wrong — it is corrected in Shanghai, where the cost of a rebuild is a fraction of what it would be on a Dubai site.
Material sampling follows the same principle. Stone slabs are selected in person at the quarries and yards we have used for twenty-five years. Fabric samples are tested for UV resistance, abrasion, and colourfastness. Brass and bronze samples are finished, aged, and sealed to confirm how they will look at year five, not year one. These samples travel to Dubai with the designer and are presented to the client in the actual light of the room they will inhabit.
The craft network behind the atelier extends beyond our own workshop. Across twenty-five years in Shanghai, we have built relationships with stone yards in Fujian, brass foundries in Zhejiang, fabric houses in Jiangsu, and lighting fabricators across the Yangtze Delta. These are not suppliers we found online. They are makers we have worked with across hundreds of projects — and whose quality we can guarantee because we have seen it fail and succeed over two decades.
When a Dubai commission calls for a four-metre dining table in book-matched walnut, or a hammam clad in honed Carrara with heated brass fittings, or a set of bedroom wardrobes with hand-matched quartered oak veneer — the specification, the prototyping, and the production happen in Shanghai. The finished pieces travel six hours by air. The quality arrives intact.
This model is not without its complexity. Shipping timelines must be factored into the programme. Customs clearance must be managed. Installation requires our own team on site, not a general contractor's labour. But the result is joinery that holds up at close range — in a market where close range is how the client will see it every day for the next twenty years.
The Shanghai atelier is not an efficiency play. It is a quality play. And in a market as competitive as Dubai, quality that you can touch is the only differentiator that survives past the first meeting.