Noir Matière
A penthouse interior at Lana Residences, Dorchester Collection, Dubai, in a tower by Foster + Partners. Commissioned by BOOBROOK, the studio of Benjamin and Natacha Bouioukliev, whose work is built on reduction, material presence and the deliberate use of darkness.
The apartment was conceived as architectural scenography inside a private residence: shadow, texture and scale continually resetting the atmosphere as you move through it. That is the thing the photography had to carry.
Noir Matière is a contradiction to photograph: rooms conceived in darkness that still have to read as warm. The palette is blackened surfaces, raw mineral texture and monolithic form. The risk is that all of it collapses into murk, the textures gone, the depth flattened, every dark surface reading as the same dark surface.
The shoot was natural light only. No strobes, no supplementary heads, nothing brought in. That was the brief, and it is the right one: lighting this apartment artificially would have described a different apartment.
The work was scheduled around the light rather than around the rooms. Each space has an hour when the sun reaches far enough in to separate one dark material from another, and outside that hour it does not. Blackened oak, polished concrete and oxidised steel only read as three different things for a short part of the day.
Figures appear in a number of the frames, not for lifestyle but for scale. In an apartment where a wall, a screen and a void can all read as the same plane of black, a person is the only reliable measure the viewer has.
The series was made to work in three places at once: editorial publication, award submission, and BOOBROOK's own portfolio. Those pull in different directions, and the only way to serve all three is to hold the tonal range wide enough that a picture can be cropped, printed or reproduced small without losing what it is about.
It was published by Architonic, e-architect, Architecture List and Archina, and submitted to the FRAME Awards under Large Apartment, where it carried a jury score of 8.19.
Noir Matière won Best Project Photography at the Créateurs Design Awards 2026, announced at the Shangri-La in Paris in January 2026. The CDA is judged peer to peer by an international jury of three hundred members across fifty-five countries.
It was the second consecutive year of being shortlisted, and the win made this the first time an Arab photographer had taken the category.
