Inside N53: The Dubai Cigar Lounge Where Falconry Becomes Fine Art
Fifty-three floors above the desert floor, suspended inside one of the most audacious feats of structural engineering on the planet, a cigar lounge has quietly become one of the most talked-about interiors in the Middle East. N53 Skyline Cigar Lounge and Rare Spirits, set within the One&Only One Za'abeel hotel in Dubai, is not a room you stumble into. It demands intention — an elevator ride, a long corridor, and then, suddenly, a space that feels like it was designed to make everything beneath it feel small. That is precisely the point.
The lounge is the work of Bergman Design House, a London-based studio co-founded by Marie Soliman and Albin Berglund, and its conceptual heart is something few Western design firms would dare to lean into so directly: falconry. At the heart of the design lies a deep respect for craft and cultural narrative, with Bergman Design House anchoring the interior with a central marquetry artwork inspired by falconry — a powerful symbol of precision, heritage, and prestige within the region — reinterpreted through a contemporary lens, allowing cultural references to feel relevant and refined rather than literal. The result is a space that draws from the UAE's oldest traditions without becoming a museum diorama, a balance that proves enormously difficult to strike and that Bergman Design House has managed with genuine elegance.
The Architecture of Arrival: What The Link Means
Before a guest even reaches N53, the building itself is making an argument. Elevated above the city within The Link — one of the world's longest cantilevered structures — the space offers sweeping, cinematic views of Dubai's skyline while redefining what a modern hospitality destination can be. Floating more than 100 meters above the streets, The Link is one of the world's longest cantilevered buildings, and from the outside it looks exactly like what it is: an act of architectural ambition so extreme it borders on provocation.
Marie Soliman, co-founder of the London-based studio, frames the structure not merely in engineering terms but as something with genuine symbolic weight. She describes The Link as a connector that "physically bridges the two towers of the complex; symbolically, it links old and new Dubai, heritage and future, business and leisure, grounded tradition and elevated luxury." That is the philosophical scaffolding the entire interior hangs from: old and new, grounded and elevated, communal and private. Every design decision traces back to that duality.
Conceived as a destination experience rather than a conventional cigar lounge, the project reflects Bergman Design House's ability to craft emotionally resonant spaces rooted in narrative, ritual, and modern luxury. Soliman has been direct about how ambitious the brief truly was. "This project presented a rare opportunity: to design not simply a cigar lounge, but a destination experience within one of the world's most prestigious hotels," she says, adding that the difference between those two things is what the project spent twelve months resolving.
Falconry as the Conceptual Spine
To understand why falconry works as the organizing theme of N53, you have to understand what it means in this part of the world. In the UAE and across the broader Arabian Peninsula, falconry is not a hobby or a historical curiosity — it is a living cultural institution, a practice that has been transmitted across generations for thousands of years and that was inscribed by UNESCO on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016. It speaks of patience, mastery, the relationship between man and nature, and a kind of aristocratic restraint that values precision over brute force. For a cigar lounge — a space built around slowness, connoisseurship, and quiet ritual — it is an almost perfect metaphor.
For N53, the designers set out to craft more than a cigar bar — they designed an atmosphere, a modern sanctuary where heritage meets refinement, and where every detail speaks a quiet, confident luxury. At the soul of the space lies fine marquetry art created as a tribute to falconry, honoring its power, grace, and deep cultural significance. Each inlay, each line, each shadow was composed to celebrate this timeless tradition through an elegant, contemporary lens.
The marquetry artwork itself is the interior's most commanding object. Rather than a painted mural or a photographic reproduction, the team chose marquetry — the centuries-old craft of inlaying precisely cut veneers of wood to form images and patterns — as the medium. This choice is significant. Marquetry is inherently slow work, requiring the kind of disciplined craftsmanship that mirrors the patience of a falconer. It also ages with a warmth that no digital print or stretched canvas can replicate. Placed at the center of the lounge, it serves as both focal point and philosophical statement: that the best things are made deliberately, by hand, over time.
A Palette Pulled From the Smoke and the Spirit
Every great interior has a color story, and N53's is unusually coherent — drawn directly from the objects at the center of the experience. The color story is rich and enveloping, with deep caramel and cognac tones dominating, layered with charcoals, smoked browns, dark bronzes, and subtle hints of amber and slate blue. These are not arbitrary choices or trend-driven selections. They are the colors of aged leaf, of aged whisky, of a room lit by low flame. They are the colors that a veteran smoker associates instinctively with comfort and focus.
According to Soliman, "these colours were chosen to echo the world of fine cigars and rare spirits while enhancing the play of light and shadow," creating a mood that is simultaneously intimate and generous, the kind of room that feels smaller and more private once you're inside it than its actual footprint would suggest. That effect — spatial compression through palette and lighting — is one of the harder tricks in hospitality design, and Bergman Design House deploys it knowingly.
Rich woods, brushed metals, leather, Cipollino marble, and custom finishes are used throughout the space, each material selected not only for visual effect but for what it contributes to the tactile experience of the room. Cipollino marble, with its swirling green and white veins, adds an unexpected note against the warmer tones — a reminder that the room's DNA, however rooted in tradition, is not interested in being predictable. Rich woods, brushed metals, leather, and Cipollino marble are layered with precision, while Murano glass lighting and bespoke metalwork add further depth. The Murano glass is a particularly telling choice: hand-blown in Venice, it carries its own craft heritage into a space already steeped in artisanal references.
Light, Layout, and the Art of Lingering
The physical arrangement of N53 reflects a sophisticated understanding of how people actually use a lounge. The layout is open yet carefully zoned, allowing for both privacy and social interaction, with seating clusters, bar moments, and a dedicated cigar display area flowing seamlessly together, all oriented towards the panoramic views. This kind of zoning — visible openness with genuine acoustic and visual privacy — is what separates a thoughtfully designed lounge from a room that merely contains furniture.
The team at Bergman Design House aimed to create an atmosphere of quiet confidence and refined indulgence, a place where guests instinctively slow down. "This was achieved through controlled lighting, intimate spatial proportions, rich materials, acoustic softness, and a layout that encourages lingering rather than spectacle," says Soliman. The language of that quote is worth pausing on: "lingering rather than spectacle." In a city whose default mode is the grand gesture, that is a genuinely countercultural design position.
A speakeasy-style VIP humidor adds an additional layer of exclusivity, reinforcing the sense that every corner of the space has been designed with intention. The speakeasy concept — hidden access, a room-within-a-room — is well-worn in hospitality design, but here it serves a practical as well as theatrical function. It gives serious collectors and regular guests a private space for storage and access without disrupting the flow of the main room. It also adds a moment of discovery to the experience, something that rewards familiarity.
The Collection: Ninety Cigars and a Rare Spirits Program
A lounge can have extraordinary design and still fall flat if the product offering is mediocre. N53 has clearly understood this. It offers a hand-picked list of rare drinks and a collection of 90 premium cigars from around the world, a number that reflects serious curation rather than quantity for its own sake. Ninety cigars is large enough to satisfy a veteran who wants options, and focused enough that every selection feels considered rather than randomly accumulated.
As daylight fades, the discreet cigar lounge comes into its own, pairing a selection of 90 premium cigars with fine spirits via the dedicated infusion programme. After dark, N53's Cigar Lounge plays host to one of Dubai's most impressive spirit collections, centering on rare bottles of Hibiki, Yamazaki, Macallan, and more. The Japanese whisky focus — Hibiki and Yamazaki, two of the most sought-after expressions in global whisky culture — alongside the Scottish authority of Macallan creates a spirits program that speaks directly to the international clientele One&Only One Za'abeel attracts. These are not bottles you buy because they're on the menu; they're bottles you know before you sit down.
Guests can step into N53's cigar lounge and discover a one-of-a-kind selection of cigars perfectly paired with fine spirits and cocktails, served in a refined ambience, with the bar open from noon through midnight — a schedule that recognizes that a serious cigar lounge is a late-afternoon and evening institution, not a morning coffee stop. N53 Skyline Cigar Lounge and Rare Spirits at One&Only One Za'abeel has been named an AHEAD MEA 2026 Finalist, an industry award that specifically recognizes outstanding hospitality design in the Middle East and Africa — a significant endorsement from the people who evaluate these spaces professionally.
Why Dubai, Why Now
N53 does not exist in a vacuum. It arrives at a moment when Dubai's appetite for refined, experience-driven hospitality has reached a new level of sophistication. Dubai has established itself as a global destination for high-net-worth individuals, investors, and entrepreneurs, and as the population of affluent residents continues to grow, demand for refined hospitality spaces has grown alongside it. Cigar lounges are a natural extension of this ecosystem, and the city also hosts major events such as The World Cigar Show, attracting collectors, retailers, and global brands. Combined with luxury hotels and members-only venues, Dubai has positioned itself as a serious player in the international cigar market.
The competition is real. Dubai already has a layered landscape of strong cigar destinations. The Churchill Club at the Four Seasons DIFC carries a distinctly London vibe, blending classic and contemporary elements seamlessly, with a cabinet humidor offering both New World and Cuban cigars. The Peacock Alley Cigar Lounge at the Waldorf Astoria DIFC, located on the 18th floor, features a New York vibe reminiscent of the 1960s, with a small retail walk-in humidor offering a selection of both Cuban and New World cigars. The Cigar Room at Fairmont The Palm is located within the hotel on the iconic Palm Jumeirah, with sweeping views of the sea on one side and the city skyline on the other, its terrace overlooking the Palm Islands and adding a distinctly Dubai backdrop to a classic cigar experience.
These are all credible, well-regarded destinations. What separates N53 is not the altitude — though 53 floors up does concentrate the mind — but the deliberateness of the conceptual framework. Most cigar lounges in Dubai, and indeed globally, draw from Western archetypes: the English gentlemen's club, the Havana smoking room, the mid-century American supper club. N53 honours Middle Eastern culture and contemporary luxury through beautiful materials and powerful design, placing its identity firmly in its geography rather than in borrowed nostalgia from another continent.
The Bergman Design House Approach: Narrative Over Decoration
The interiors were completed by Bergman Design House, a London-based studio co-founded by Marie Soliman and Albin Berglund. The firm has built its reputation on spaces that resist the impulse to decorate in favor of the harder work of storytelling through architecture and materials. Their philosophy is legible throughout N53 — not in any single object or surface, but in the way every decision reinforces every other decision, creating a room whose consistency is more felt than analyzed.
Bergman Design House approached the project with the intention of transforming movement into arrival, ensuring the experience feels cinematic, immersive, and quietly powerful from the moment guests enter. That phrase — transforming movement into arrival — is a precise description of the choreographic thinking that goes into the best hospitality interiors. The walk to N53, through a building that is itself a spectacle, primes the guest for something significant. The lounge has to reward that priming, and by all accounts it does.
Rich materials, intimate proportions, and meticulous detailing combine to create a timeless atmosphere where evenings unfold with quiet sophistication. Through N53, Bergman Design House delivers a destination that seamlessly merges heritage, storytelling, and modern luxury, transforming a cigar lounge into an elevated cultural experience — one where the act of smoking a cigar becomes part of a much larger conversation about place, tradition, and the particular pleasures of slowing down in a city that rarely does.
What It Means for the Broader World of Cigar Culture
The design world tends to treat cigar lounges as a niche, even slightly unglamorous, brief. They are associated with heavy materials, dim lighting, and a clientele presumed to be indifferent to aesthetic nuance. N53 dismantles that assumption methodically. Here is a space that has been shortlisted for a global design award, that was featured prominently in Design Milk — a publication whose readership is primarily design professionals — and that has drawn serious attention from architecture and interiors media that does not typically dwell on the cigar category.
For American enthusiasts, the significance extends beyond a destination to add to a travel list. N53 represents a signal that the cigar lounge, as a typology, is undergoing genuine design maturation. For years, the finest smoking rooms in the world were judged primarily by their humidors and their whisky lists. Those remain essential. But N53 argues — and makes the argument persuasively — that the physical environment is itself a form of hospitality, that the room you sit in shapes the experience of what you smoke and drink in ways that deserve serious investment and original thinking.
According to a Khaleej Times report, the UAE's luxury market is expected to grow at nearly 9 percent between 2025 and 2030, mostly driven by experience-based spending, and cigar lounges fall perfectly into that new definition of luxury. That projection matters because it tells us that what N53 has built is not an eccentric outlier but a preview of what the category is moving toward — experiences that justify themselves not through square footage or inventory but through the quality and coherence of the world they construct around the guest.
A Room That Makes the City Worth Pausing For
There is a useful way to evaluate any ambitious interior: does it succeed on its own terms? N53 set out to be not a conventional cigar lounge but a destination experience rooted in narrative, ritual, and modern luxury. The falconry marquetry at its center is not decoration — it is an argument about where this room comes from and what it values. The palette is not fashionable — it is functional, calibrated to enhance the very sensory experience that brings people to a cigar lounge in the first place. The layout does not prioritize capacity — it prioritizes the kind of privacy and flow that makes a guest want to stay for a second cigar rather than settling the check after the first.
What sets N53 apart is its refusal to follow convention. It is not about excess or display, but about nuance — the interplay of light, material, and mood. In a city known for its bold gestures, this elevated lounge offers something more considered: a refined, immersive environment where luxury is experienced rather than declared. For anyone who has spent time in the great smoking rooms of Havana, London, New York, or Zürich, that is not a small claim. It is, in fact, the only claim worth making. And on the evidence of N53, Bergman Design House has earned the right to make it.
