The majlis is the region’s oldest hospitality typology: a space built around gathering, generosity, and a carefully managed threshold between public and private. Ramadan, meanwhile, reshapes how restaurants and hotels actually operate for a month each year — compressing demand into iftar peaks and extending service deep into the night. Designing well for both is less about motif and more about choreography. This article sets out what the majlis means spatially, how contemporary UAE venues are interpreting it, and what operators should consider before Ramadan arrives.
What is the majlis as a spatial tradition?
A majlis is, at its simplest, a room for receiving — a dedicated place of assembly where guests are welcomed, seated, and served. Architecturally, it carries three consistent qualities. First, generosity of proportion: the room is scaled to host, not merely to accommodate. Second, a defined threshold: entry sequences mark the transition from public to private, signalling to guests that they have been received. Third, orientation towards gathering: seating traditionally runs along the perimeter, facing inward, so the room itself becomes the social instrument.
These qualities predate the modern hospitality industry by centuries, and they remain legible in Emirati domestic architecture today. For designers working in hospitality, the majlis is not a style. It is a set of spatial convictions — about welcome, hierarchy, and how people sit together — that can be carried into contemporary work without quotation marks.
How is contemporary UAE hospitality interpreting the majlis?
The most convincing contemporary interpretations abstract the majlis rather than decorate it. The most cited recent example, as reported, is the restaurant ‘People’ in Dubai, conceived as a contemporary majlis with sunken, U-shaped seating: the communal perimeter is preserved, the floor level drops to create intimacy, and the room reads as unmistakably modern rather than nostalgic.
This is the pattern worth noting. The sunken U is the perimeter seating of the traditional majlis, translated; the lowered plane creates the inward focus that cushions along a wall once provided. What has been removed is the ornament; what has been retained is the social geometry. Dubai’s dining culture — now anchored by a Michelin Guide that in 2025 awarded its first three-star ratings in the city and covered 119 restaurants across 35 cuisines, according to the Guide — increasingly rewards exactly this kind of culturally literate design.
What does Ramadan change about hospitality operations?
Ramadan inverts the daily rhythm of an F&B venue. Demand concentrates into two peaks: iftar, where large parties arrive within a narrow window at sunset, and late-evening trading, which can run well past midnight. A venue designed only for steady, evenly distributed covers will underperform for a month of the year.
Spatially, this argues for three things. Large-format seating that hosts family and corporate iftar groups without fragmenting them. Acoustic and lighting zones that feel calm before sunset, then absorb a full house within minutes. And circulation that tolerates simultaneous arrival: iftar guests do not trickle in. They arrive together, and the entry sequence, host position, and route to table all carry the strain at once.
How should designers handle prayer rooms, ablution, and family zones?
Prayer provision is an operational necessity and a design decision. In hospitality settings, a prayer room should sit close enough to the dining areas to be genuinely useful at iftar and maghrib, with ablution facilities adjacent where the programme allows. The spaces deserve the same material care as the public rooms; a prayer room that reads as an afterthought undermines the very welcome the venue is trying to extend.
Family zones follow a similar logic. During Ramadan, multi-generational dining is the norm, and seating plans benefit from semi-enclosed or acoustically softened areas where large families can gather without dominating the room for other guests. Neither provision requires literal references. They require adjacency planning, acoustic discipline, and honest materials — the same toolkit any well-resolved hospitality interior already uses.
What should hoteliers and restaurateurs consider before Ramadan?
Timing first. Industry-observed timelines for hospitality projects in the UAE commonly run six to ten months from lease to opening, which means design decisions for Ramadan service need to be made many months in advance — not in the weeks before the month begins.
Sequencing second. The iftar window is the stress test: arrival, seating, and first service all compress into minutes, and layout, kitchen pass position, and host stand placement should be resolved against that peak, not against an average evening. Third, atmosphere: circadian-aware lighting — a trend now central to hospitality design thinking at firms such as Wimberly and Gensler — is particularly apt for Ramadan, when a room may need to feel contemplative at sunset and convivial two hours later.
How does Studio By Three approach regional ritual without pastiche?
We begin from behaviour, not imagery. Our F&B work in Abu Dhabi — from the compact discipline of Brunch Morsel to the tiered, monochromatic pavilion of Mamafri Mamsha — is built on understanding how people actually gather, sit, and are served in the region, then giving those patterns a contemporary spatial form. With Noor, our open-air café in Muscat, Oman, the project engages the Omani courtyard tradition through a terracotta volume and a designed microclimate: the ritual of outdoor gathering is honoured through climate and enclosure, not applied decoration.
That is the discipline we would bring to any majlis-informed brief. Thresholds that mean something. Seating geometries that gather people rather than scatter them. Materials used honestly. We do not design for the ego, and we do not reach for mashrabiya screens when a lowered floor plane and a well-judged light level would say more.
If you are planning a restaurant, café, or hotel space in the UAE or Oman — whether or not Ramadan service is part of the brief — Studio By Three works from our warehouse studio in Al Quoz, Dubai, on hospitality interiors across the region. We would be glad to discuss how regional ritual can sharpen, rather than constrain, a contemporary design.