Enjoying caviar demands a suitably luxurious serving dish. The award-winning designer Katharine Pooley describes her conch shell caviar bowl as “the most incredible, to-die-for piece”.
It has a to-die-for price, too – Dh98,000.
Inside the conch shell, nestles a clear crystal bowl for the caviar.
“It is absolutely colossal,” Ms Pooley says of the unusually huge shell. “It’s just so, so hard to find a bowl so big – it’s just delicious.”
While she launched her own homeware line six months ago, she also procures bowls and a Thai supplier that offers these in two designs – one has an amethyst-eyed, solid silver dragon climbing over it; the other is decorated by a starfish and is adorned by amethysts.
Ms Pooley stumbled across the Thai supplier on her travels. The silver is from India, the jewels from Myanmar.
Because very large shells are so difficult to find, the pieces are high. “You can reorder,” she says. “But you are looking at a six-month lead time. And if you ask for 100 — absolutely no. Sorry.”
Ms Pooley, who services her UAE clients via her online shop, has eponymous boutiques in London and Doha.
She lived in Asia for 16 years where she worked in banking. Her move into interior design as a full-time career was unexpected.
She and her husband bought “four houses across four continents and I did them up” she says. “People seemed to love what I had done.
“We went back to London and someone said, ‘Will you do my house’ and I said ‘Yes’ and then Mohamed Al-Fayed [then the owner of Harrods] asked me to do a house and before I knew it I had a huge team in London and a lovely boutique and I didn’t look back.”
As well as her interior design services, Ms Pooley’s homeware range offers highly individual pieces for bathrooms, dining, drinks and the study. She also stocks antique and luxury items.
The extent of her travels are evident in the collection. Particularly beautiful are the silver-plated Arabian picture frames starting at Dh1,586.
For cigar smokers, her elegant handcrafted, shagreen humidors featuring a sterling silver dragon, a cedar lining, a humidification device and a hygrometer, which measures the moisture content in the atmosphere, are “small enough to go with you when you travel, but elegant enough to keep on a desk”. They retail at Dh108,425.
From banker to luxury designer
Katharine Pooley is the founder of the eponymous luxury architecture, furniture and interior design company
You have your boutique in Knightsbridge, London, but also a store in Doha. How did that come about?
We did up the VIP suites at London Terminal 5. And Nasser Al Ansari, the chief executive of Qatar real estate company Octagon, happened to go through and he loved what we had done. He asked if we could come and do his house. We did that in seven months and then he said, “Let’s do a shop”.
Have you any plans to open in the UAE?
I’d love to be in Abu Dhabi and I’d love to be in Dubai. I actually grew up in Bahrain so I know the Middle East very well. I’m just trying to find the right partner and location. There is so much demand for people to open down there. I think Qatar is expanding very fast. There are a lot of opportunities. I really loved it.
How did you find the transition from banking to interior design?
It just happened. You are either creative or you are not; I was blessed to say that I am. You’ve also got to have good taste, love colours. I’ve travelled a lot, enormously, and that helps to understand the cultures. We have a very big team – 35 to 40 people – we love to travel, we understand the client, customer service. The banking side of it is super important because it helps you put a structure in place, administration, finances. You’ve got to understand your figures and how you can turn things round with a good profit margin.
lgutcher@thenational.ae
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A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
2025 Fifa Club World Cup groups
Group A: Palmeiras, Porto, Al Ahly, Inter Miami.
Group B: Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid, Botafogo, Seattle.
Group C: Bayern Munich, Auckland City, Boca Juniors, Benfica.
Group D: Flamengo, ES Tunis, Chelsea, (Leon banned).
Group E: River Plate, Urawa, Monterrey, Inter Milan.
Group F: Fluminense, Borussia Dortmund, Ulsan, Mamelodi Sundowns.
Group G: Manchester City, Wydad, Al Ain, Juventus.
Group H: Real Madrid, Al Hilal, Pachuca, Salzburg.
Champions parade (UAE timings)
7pm Gates open
8pm Deansgate stage showing starts
9pm Parade starts at Manchester Cathedral
9.45pm Parade ends at Peter Street
10pm City players on stage
11pm event ends
A State of Passion
Directors: Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi
Stars: Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah
Rating: 4/5
Tuesday's fixtures
Kyrgyzstan v Qatar, 5.45pm
NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
More on animal trafficking
THE SPECS
Engine: 2.0-litre 4-cylinder turbo
Power: 275hp at 6,600rpm
Torque: 353Nm from 1,450-4,700rpm
Transmission: 8-speed dual-clutch auto
Top speed: 250kph
Fuel consumption: 6.8L/100km
On sale: Now
Price: Dh146,999
DUBAI%20BLING%3A%20EPISODE%201
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In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
The specs
AT4 Ultimate, as tested
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
Power: 420hp
Torque: 623Nm
Transmission: 10-speed automatic
Price: From Dh330,800 (Elevation: Dh236,400; AT4: Dh286,800; Denali: Dh345,800)
On sale: Now
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MATCH INFO
Championship play-offs, second legs:
Aston Villa 0
Middlesbrough 0
(Aston Villa advance 1-0 on aggregate)
Fulham 2
Sessegnon (47'), Odoi (66')
Derby County 0
(Fulham advance 2-1 on aggregate)
Final
Saturday, May 26, Wembley. Kick off 8pm (UAE)
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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Killing of Qassem Suleimani
The Bio
Favourite vegetable: “I really like the taste of the beetroot, the potatoes and the eggplant we are producing.”
Holiday destination: “I like Paris very much, it’s a city very close to my heart.”
Book: “Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. I am not a communist, but there are a lot of lessons for the capitalist system, if you let it get out of control, and humanity.”
Musician: “I like very much Fairuz, the Lebanese singer, and the other is Umm Kulthum. Fairuz is for listening to in the morning, Umm Kulthum for the night.”
The story in numbers
18
This is how many recognised sects Lebanon is home to, along with about four million citizens
450,000
More than this many Palestinian refugees are registered with UNRWA in Lebanon, with about 45 per cent of them living in the country’s 12 refugee camps
1.5 million
There are just under 1 million Syrian refugees registered with the UN, although the government puts the figure upwards of 1.5m
73
The percentage of stateless people in Lebanon, who are not of Palestinian origin, born to a Lebanese mother, according to a 2012-2013 study by human rights organisation Frontiers Ruwad Association
18,000
The number of marriages recorded between Lebanese women and foreigners between the years 1995 and 2008, according to a 2009 study backed by the UN Development Programme
77,400
The number of people believed to be affected by the current nationality law, according to the 2009 UN study
4,926
This is how many Lebanese-Palestinian households there were in Lebanon in 2016, according to a census by the Lebanese-Palestinian dialogue committee
