In Dubai's Jumeira Third, Berlin studio VAUST stages OUNASS STAGE, a 700 sqm retail floor where galvanized steel walls meet glass-block silos and walkable sand pits.
OUNASS, the Gulf luxury e-commerce platform, asked VAUST for its first physical store. What the Berlin studio delivered reads less like a flagship and more like a soundstage. Visitors arrive from street level or from the basement parking via a stainless steel lift, then move the length of an elongated floorplate before exiting on the opposite side. The plan refuses the loop that retail usually enforces. It behaves like a building.
VAUST calls the operating idea Alternate Abundance. The translation on the floor is brutalism without apology: board-formed concrete columns left with their pour seams visible, concrete soffit ceilings carrying recessed linear LED slots in place of the suspended planes that standardise luxury retail, and pale polished concrete underfoot that reads almost like sand. The polished neutrality of the Gulf flagship is not just absent. It has been dismantled.
The most literal connection to the surrounding geography sits underfoot. A series of sunken interventions are cut into the slab and filled with sand sourced from the Sharjah desert, then sealed under walkable glass. The pits read as small geological windows in the floor, sometimes square, sometimes rectangular, each one slightly off-axis from the column grid. They do the editorial work the building’s marketing copy cannot.
Two cylindrical silos of clear glass block rise the full height of the space and house the changing rooms. Their walls catch the low Dubai sun and turn it into a soft prismatic glow, then read at night as backlit lanterns set against the dark galvanized steel of the rear wall. Inside the silos, the language inverts: dark walnut panels and wall-to-wall carpet across floor and walls dampen sound to almost nothing. Stainless steel slot reveals label functions with hairline engraved type set vertically into the doorframes.
The galvanized rear wall is the project’s hidden engine. Conceived as inhabited infrastructure, it absorbs the kitchen, stock room, staff workspace, toilets and a large conference room into a single continuous volume clad in mottled zinc-spangle steel. Two sculptural staircases of clear glass block emerge from it, lifting visitors toward a raised landing where a hi-fi tower of professional studio monitors and a DJ console turn the space into an event platform. Joern von Scheipers contributes a crumpled-foil tapestry that hangs flat against the concrete; Balzer Balzer’s boulder-form seating in cast resin sits low to the floor like meteorites.
OUNASS STAGE refuses the script of the Gulf flagship: no marble, no gold leaf, no chandeliers. It instead borrows the vocabulary of Berlin’s club and gallery scenes, raw shell, industrial steel, glass block, sound system as furniture, and lets a luxury platform inhabit it. The result behaves like a space that can host a runway one week, an art opening the next and an ordinary Tuesday of fittings in between, without any of the three feeling like the wrong tenant.
