This Dubai Hotel Has Turned Its Lobby into a Snow Forest

JW Marriott Marquis Dubai has traded traditional decorations for a cool, sculptural Snow Forest

Dubai’s festive season usually arrives at full volume: giant trees, metallic ribbons, decorations designed to be seen from across an atrium. This winter, one of Business Bay’s most recognisable twin-tower hotels has taken a different route. Walk into the lobby and the whole celebration has been distilled into a single idea: Snow Forest.

Instead of a classic Christmas scene, the hotel has handed its entrance over to a sculptural installation created with design studio Goshá Buro. The brief was to bring a sense of winter into the hotel lobby through an artistic, contemporary lens. Goshá Buro took the brief and designed an installation inspired by a frosty, snow-covered forest, bringing a sense of calm and serenity into the otherwise buzzing lobby. People are still checking in, rolling suitcases and waiting for cars, but they’re doing it around something that clearly hasn’t been dropped in as an afterthought.

At the centre is a towering tree form that holds the room. Built from stacked white spheres, it plays with shape and repetition instead, building a silhouette that hints at snowdrifts and softened edges without spelling anything out. From some angles, it looks sharp and graphic; from others, it has the softness of a snow-covered landscape. The more minimal the structure, the more people project onto it.

Goshá Buro’s signature shows up in the details. While the studio is known for work that sits between art and spatial design, this installation follows a composed rhythm.

It sort of introduces a deliberate pause right in the middle of all that. People meet beside it, use it as a reference point, stand in front of it while they wait. Children orbit around the base, phones come out for a quick shot, and for a moment, the scale of the hotel feels anchored by a single, simple form.