PDL Cafe, Dubai Mall

PDL cafe designed by one of Dubai’s most exciting emerging interior design studios, Nakkash Design Studio, combines the crisp lines of Californian modernism with PDL’s roots in cycling and barbershop culture.

PDL (pronounced Pedal) is a chain of cycling-themed, urban barbershops and speciality coffee houses with two locations across Dubai. The Dubai Mall cafe, which adjoins the American Rag Cie clothing store in Dubai Mall, is the brand’s latest outpost opening in June 2021.  The client brief called for Nakkash Design Studio to create a cafe with a relaxed and inviting atmosphere that would encourage shoppers to linger for longer within the busy and distracting context of the mall. It also required the design team to organise ample seating, a generous coffee bar and a kitchenette within a tight 76-square-metre footprint.

The material palette combines striking petrol blue and off-white tiles by Vogue Ceramica with quartz tabletops, walnut joinery, and teal upholstery to create a fresh interior that subtly nods to the mid-century.

Visitors enter the cafe via a huge blue tile-clad archway opening that spans the entire width of the cafe – a feature that is unique within the vast shopping complex. The welcoming form of the cafe’s arched entrance is echoed in the undulating wall feature that is installed above the coffee bar, in the arched frame of the pocket door in the cafe’s sidewall and in the curved backs of the Pedrali Remind 3730 chairs that occupy the seating area in front of the cafe.

Despite the limited floor space, the retail unit’s generous ceiling height and abundance of natural light from a skylight make the cafe feel bright and spacious. To further enhance this feeling of lightness and to create a visually soft connection with the neighbouring clothing store, the design team used panels of Svensson sheer fabric, from Sweden, to separate the two. A series of industrial pendant lamps that hang on chains from a steel grid above reference PDL’s association with cycling while a selection of custom designed teal benches with splayed legs and cane coffee table referencing the mid-century modern furniture style from the 1970s.