Words By Allegra Salvadori

What if summer in the Gulf wasn’t something to flee, but something to feel—fully, sensorially, and inwardly? For one evening only, this quiet provocation took form inside a beachfront villa at One&Only The Palm, reimagined as a living artwork by French-Lebanese artist Jenna Bitar. The installation, Botanique, curated in collaboration with ArtKōrero, was not an exhibition in the traditional sense—it was a gesture. A space unmade and remade by nature, memory, and light.

Drawing from her upbringing in Bali and her practice of painting as immersive ritual, Bitar enveloped the villa in warm, earthen tones—dusty ambers, oxidised reds, sun-bleached pinks. Her works didn’t adorn the space; they absorbed it. Walls became weathered skins, canvases breathed with botanical intensity. “I wanted it to feel like stepping into a still life,” she said. “Not to observe nature, but to be inside it.”

This marked Bitar’s Dubai debut, though her international ascent has been swift. Recently the face of Maison Margiela’s From the Garden campaign, she moves with rare fluidity between the visual and the sensorial, between gallery and landscape.

For ArtKōrero—the curatorial force behind the project—the villa was not just a backdrop but a thesis: that luxury can be atmospheric rather than material, and that a home, even briefly, can become a poem. Botanique now continues within the resort’s lobby, open to visitors by guided appointment.

In a city often defined by spectacle, Botanique offered something subtler and more subversive: the invitation to linger, to listen, and to let summer sink in.