Baylasan Kanj, founder of 2BK Interiors, on feeling-led design, the discipline of working across homes, clinics, restaurants and gyms, and why luxury and warmth were never meant to be opposites.
I have always believed a room has one real job, and it is not to impress you. It is to make you feel something the moment you walk in. That belief is why I started 2BK Interiors three years ago. After years of designing other people’s briefs, I wanted a studio that begins every project with one question, before any material or floor plan: how does the person who lives here want to feel?
The decision did not come from theory. It came from a pattern I kept noticing. My clients returned with new projects, and they sent me their friends, and what they were responding to was harder to name than a palette or a piece of furniture. It was the way space made them feel once they were living inside it. Once I understood that, I could not design any other way.
The timing helped. Something has shifted in what people ask of a space. Across the region, clients have become more sophisticated, and they are no longer satisfied with interiors that only look expensive. They want design that is refined and genuinely purposeful, that works emotionally and practically rather than simply photographing well. I built 2BK Interiors for that shift, and I treat it as a baseline rather than a selling point. To me, a beautiful space that leaves you feeling nothing is unfinished.
Today we work across residential, hospitality, healthcare, wellness and commercial projects throughout the UAE and the wider region. On paper, these worlds have nothing in common. A villa is not a fertility clinic, AND a restaurant is not a gym. But every brief we take on begins with the same question about feeling, and that is what lets one studio move so fluently between them. The technical answers are completely different. The starting point never changes.
It also means refusing one of the trade-offs the industry takes for granted. Luxury is often treated as something cool and untouchable, as though a space must choose between feeling expensive and feeling welcoming. I have never believed that. The most luxurious thing a room can be is welcoming. Warmth is part of the luxury, not the opposite of it.
In our residential work, that often shows up as restraint. Villa Margham, which we completed in Dubai in 2023, runs to more than two thousand square meters, a scale that tempts you toward spectacle. We resisted it. Clean lines, honest materials and a palette chosen to age well were there to create a family home built for the long term, the kind of house a family settles into rather than performs in. The luxury is quiet, measured in comfort and belonging rather than in statement pieces.
The Marina Penthouse, finished in 2022, took a different site and the same instinct for calm. Overlooking the water from one of Dubai’s most prestigious waterfront addresses, it was designed to let the sea lead. We held the interior to whites and soft blues so nothing competed with the view and let the horizon become part of the room. The brief had a spectacular outlook. The deeper objective was ease, a home that lowers your shoulders the moment you walk in.
With Enwat Development, we moved from one home to hundreds: two residential towers in JVC. Here elegance had to coexist with cost discipline and long-term value for the developer, which is usually where ambitious design quietly disappears. I see that as a real challenge, not a compromise. We focused on efficient, light-filled layouts, durable materials and small considered details that make an ordinary day feel better, all within a controlled budget. Designing well for hundreds of homes is harder than designing one perfect villa, and it matters just as much, because it shapes how a lot of people live.
If residential design is about settling in, hospitality is about being taken somewhere. Sansation, our most recognizable hospitality concept, opened first in Motor City, then Arabian Ranches, and reached DIFC in 2025. Each branch carries the same Mediterranean idea, crisp white surfaces, deep blue accents, natural textures and the unhurried light of the Greek islands, so that a guest sitting down in Dubai feels momentarily somewhere else. Keeping one identity alive across three very different sites, without it ever feeling copied, is closer to brand-building than decoration, and it is central to how we approach hospitality.
Healthcare is where our emotional approach meets its hardest technical test. Our fertility center in Riyadh, currently under construction, must meet world-class medical and operational standards, but almost no one arrives at an IVF center relaxed. So, space must do something more gentle at the same time. It must lower heart rate. We design for the patient’s emotional state and for the way the medical team works at once. The same thinking runs through the clinics we have delivered across Dubai, each one balanced between the people who walk anxiously and the people who care for them all day.
Wellness gave us a chance to design for how people feel about themselves. FitnGlam at Yas Mall, completed in 2025, is a women-only destination with dedicated studios for Reformer Pilates, yoga, spin and Hyrox. We designed it to receive women rather than expose them, with a calm, confident palette built around how a woman wants to feel when she walks in. For me, confidence is a design outcome, not an accident.
Platform Grande, completed in 2026 inside Grande Signature Residences in Downtown Dubai, took the brief in the opposite direction: a premium gym where luxury and performance are partners rather than rivals. High-end finishes, bespoke lighting and carefully chosen materials give a training space the considered feel of a fine residential interior. A gym does not have to feel industrial to perform. This one is designed to make strength feel elegant and effort feel like something you look forward to.
As 2BK Interiors grows across an increasingly regional portfolio, that founding question, how does a person want to feel here, stays at the center of everything we do. The range of our work is not lacking in focus. It is the same conviction applied to very different lives. I am not interested in spaces that only photograph well. people spaces that hold people, that calm them, lift them, and stay with them long after they leave. If a room can do that, it was worth designing.
