Zooba Restaurant
Restaurant fit-out at Al Liwan Mall, Hamala
Complete interior fit-out works including MEP, joinery & metal works. The brand's first flagship in Bahrain — ninety days at Al Liwan Mall in Hamala, opening to a fully booked first week.
The constraint — value engineering a flagship without diluting the brand
We took the project on at a keen price, and that shaped how it had to be run. Value engineering on a flagship is a narrow discipline: the brand identity is the asset and cannot be diluted, so the saving has to come from method, sequence and material substitution that a customer will never detect — not from the things that make the room what it is.
How we solved it — running approvals eight hours out of step with New York
The brand owner and their consultant were in New York, which put the approvals cycle eight hours out of step with the site. Coordination, submittals and sign-offs happened at night, at the end of our day and the middle of theirs. On a ninety-day programme with a fixed opening, a query that waits a full day for an answer costs more than the answer is worth, so the working pattern had to bend to the time difference rather than the other way round.
What this means for a restaurant fit-out
Al Liwan applies strict fit-out procedures — inspections, documentation and access all governed by the centre — and the site work itself ran on night shift outside trading hours. The restaurant opened on the date it had been given.
- Mall unit
- Night shifts
- Fixed handover date
