Shopping Mall

“(…) the trend was now in full swing, and the pursuit of a new architectural language for the luxury, shopping and leisure facilities, and a new residential and office space dimension, couldn’t help but prompt a new kind of observation of occidental modernity, in order to transfer it to the Gulf Coast and transform it into an expression of ultramodernism. In the spring 2001 Majed Al Sabah, the thirty-something descendant of the Emir sheik Jaber Al-Amad Al Jaber Al Sabah, opened the Villa Moda emporium in Shuwaikh, on the sea that glimmers by the coast of Kuwait. With this cathedral of international fashion in the desert Al Sabah wanted to change the notion of the “Gulf States” replacing the traditional association with “oil” with some adjective like luxury, modernity, sensuality, taste. In the hands of the Italian architect Pierfrancesco Cravel the design of Villamoda has developed as a light construction using glass and transparency, a sort of large architectural seashell with rigorous geometry, marked by a series of stainless steel pilasters that glitter like a mirage and like the entire construction in the building light of a desert dune. In the interior, the steel pillars are repeated to mark the paths between the glass cubes that have become boutiques for the world’s leading fashion brands: Gucci, Prada, Bottega Veneta, Salvatore Ferragamo, Fendi, Etro, just to name a few, compose the sequence of spaces of this unusual, ultramodern high fashion marketplace. The furnishings of the restaurant and bar by B&B Italia, together with the pieces by Cappellini scattered in the connecting space in a discrete manner, indicate the taste of things Italian in this space fir elite shopping that rightfully assumes its place in the ranks of the new Gulf architecture (…)”

Antonella Boisi, Matteo Vercelloni
“Arabian Dream” Interni N. 530
April 2003 p. 290-293