TANIT - designing for a market that isn't mine

TANIT Interiors is a luxury fit-out and construction studio in Dubai - residential, hospitality, commercial. I wasn't designing for myself or for a UK small business; I was designing for a market where the competitive set is five-star hotel groups and premium F&B brands, and the site had to read as credible in that room from the first scroll.

That meant leaning into scale and trust signals that would feel like overkill anywhere else - a full logo strip of hospitality and commercial partners, a five-stage process (Discover, Design, Quote, Build, Handover) laid out explicitly so a client committing six figures to a renovation can see exactly what they're buying into before they ever pick up the phone. Editorial photography, confident type, minimal copy per section - the opposite instinct to over-explaining, because in that market restraint reads as expensive and over-explanation reads as trying too hard.

The build itself is a fairly standard Next.js site, but the actual work was translating "luxury fit-out for the Gulf" into interface decisions - what gets a full-bleed image versus a text block, how much white space a UAE hospitality client's homepage can hold before it reads as empty rather than premium. Small market, specific taste - and getting that taste right is most of what design engineering actually is.