Designs on detail: the exclusive furniture of Nine Stars

We meet man behind the furniture at some of the UAE’s trendiest venues.

Girish Mahtani, the founder of Nine Stars International, pictured at Coya with some of his company’s furniture. Victor Besa for The National

As I sit down for lunch at Coya, Dubai’s hippest new eatery, the waiter slides a hidden ledge out from the base of my chair. It’s for my bag – because no self-respecting lady who lunches should be forced to rest their ­designer tote on the floor. Secretly, I’m delighted at this little piece of hidden engineering; it’s a tiny and not entirely essential detail, but the kind that makes the ­difference between an average interior and a memorable one.

Hospitality design is a huge part of the public consciousness in the UAE. What might be a special treat in other parts of the world is a weekly, if not daily, occurrence in these parts. Whether you’re grabbing a meal, conducting a business meeting, hanging out with friends, spending a day by the pool or at the spa, or enjoying a weekend getaway, the average person in the UAE will spend an above-average amount of time traipsing through, sitting in, sleeping in or being inspired by hotels and restaurants. Which makes the design of these spaces all the more important. This is where we’re exposed to different kinds of design and learn what we do and don’t like. And while we may not be able to afford that oversized chandelier in the lobby of our favourite hotel, or the designer chairs that make our favourite lounge so comfortable, they help us to form ideas of which colours we respond to, what features catch our eye and which design styles we aspire to in our own homes.

Girish Mahtani is one of the people responsible for making these details. He’s the founder of Nine Stars International, a company that specialises in creating bespoke furniture for hotels and restaurants around the world. His mission is simple: manufacturing great-looking, high-quality furniture that’s fit for purpose – chairs that are comfortable to sit on, don’t topple over when you get up and actually fit under the table; stools that don’t make your back ache and are of a height that allows you to have a conversation with the person standing next to you at the bar; hotel-room desks that you can actually work on and don’t merely serve as space-­guzzling pieces of sculpture; minibar cabinet doors that open in the right direction; and chairs with built-in ledges for you to rest your bag on. Basically, all those little things that you take for granted, but might just ruin a meal, night out or hotel stay if they do start going wrong.

The Sri Lanka-born Mahtani founded Nine Stars in 2006. He was working for his family’s business in Hong Kong, but had identified a gap in the global market for bespoke, contract-grade furniture solutions. “There’s a universal lack of good furniture,” he tells me over lunch. “This always intrigued me – the design, the functionality, the ­usability.

“There’s very little hospitality furniture that can actually accom- modate the required footfall, turnaround and wear-and-tear, which has to be extremely high. You need special fabrics and special leathers, you need to look at the weight of the product, how it is being built and how it deals with scratches, stains and so on. This is the niche that we wanted to get into. And the more time I spent looking into it, the more it intrigued me. So I put everything aside, including the family business, and pursued this.”

He moved to Dubai because it made business sense for him to do so. “Knowing the rapid rate of growth here, I just thought it would be the smartest move. Geographically, as well, it made a lot of sense, because we manufacture in Italy and Vietnam, so here we are equidistant from our manufacturing points, which are strategically placed to cater to all our clients worldwide, and we are equidistant to the East and the West.”

Vietnam was chosen not only because of its strategic location and that it allows Nine Stars to source raw materials from across Asia, but because of the quality of the craftsmanship on offer.

“Everybody manufactures furniture in China. Unfortunately, it has very bad connotations when it comes to quality. Vietnam is a very underexposed furniture manufacturing market; the most important thing is the quality of craftsmanship it offers. Because of the French influence, the artistic talent of the craftsmen is fantastic and the intricately detailed work that comes out of Vietnam is at a far superior level to that coming out of China or Malaysia or anywhere else. We also needed to have the capacity to mass ­manufacture.”

In Italy, the company works with a manufacturing facility an hour west of Venice, which, Mahtani says, is for clients who require a higher level of detail and quality, and are willing to pay a premium for it. “Between Vietnam and ­Italy, we have the capacity to do upholstery in fabric, leather, ­velvet and any other material, and to work with wood, metal, glass – the list is endless. There’s nothing we can’t do, and if there is something that we haven’t done before, we will take the time to learn how to do it.”

Nine Stars’ extensive project list includes Fairmont The Palm, the Emirates Airline first- and business-class lounges at Terminal 3 of Dubai International Airport and popular high-end eateries such as Atmosphere in the Burj Khalifa, Zuma restaurants in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Turkey and New York, and, most recently, Coya at the Four Seasons Resort Dubai at Jumeirah Beach. There’s also Amilla Fuschi, an uber-luxurious resort in the Maldives, which Mahtani promises “is going to be the benchmark of Maldivian luxury”.

This all puts Mahtani in a prime position to see how the UAE’s public spaces are evolving, and how global design trends are being translated and repackaged for UAE audiences. “I think we’re going back, regressing, but in a positive way. We’re going back to older designs, seeing more use of leather, more industrial-style furniture, rougher finishings and more work that’s done by hand.”

So expect to see more of this in the next hotel you visit – and perhaps even in your own home in months to come.

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