Solomon & Wu Create a “Snow Wall” in Dubai

The wall hangs in ten individual sections in between the cafe’s existing columns.

The British firm

Solomon & Wu

, in collaboration with

Wimberly Interiors

, has installed an 18-foot-tall resin “snow wall” in the Aspen by Kempinksi café of the

Kempinski Mall of the Emirates Hotel in Dubai

, which overlooks Ski Dubai, the largest indoor ski resort in the Middle East.

“The main challenge,” says Jake Solomon, director, Solomon & Wu, “was the size.” The staggering 1,110 square feet of wall with a one-foot relief of sculpted design was made in the firm’s workshops in London, with the help of CAD and polystyrene prototypes, and then shipped to Dubai. The resulting 40 sections were fit into 14 crates measuring 18 feet long and 5 feet square and shipped to Dubai to be joined together on site.

One of the 40 crates ready for shipping.

“To get a shipping company to pick this up became problematic so we ended up hiring half a cargo plane and our own logistics team to get the crates to the airport,” explains Solomon. “Once everything arrived in Dubai, we discovered that the door to the building wasn’t quite big enough so ended up making our own by knocking a big hole in the wall!”

Each section had to be painted in plaster and then sanded to create a smooth finish.

The perseverance paid off, however, as the glass-reinforced plastic showpiece brings a touch of the mountains to the desert hotel.