In 2025, in its tenth year, Rouya chose to rethink the interplay of space, practice, and responsibility.
The consultancy decided to rent a public-facing office in Madar_39, Abu Dhabi to explore how environments shape how people work. The move became an interesting inquiry into the values and ethics of productivity, and how a workplace can carry inherited ways of being and working together.
Rouya was engaged to develop and execute a well-researched, comprehensive communications, public relations, and digital media strategy for the event. Despite a compressed timeline, complex subject matter, and high-profile protocol sensitivities, Rouya successfully delivered a robust, research-driven messaging framework, secured extensive media coverage, and established a strong digital presence from a standing start.
Context is an important one to understand
After a decade of purposeful partnerships on national narratives, Rouya recognised that its way of working required an urgent renewal. The team has grown in size and capability, and our work and purpose now require us to engage with communities across the UAE and translate cultural knowledge into strategy through direct contact and context.
Since Rouya began in 2015, our working lives have taken many forms. We started at home, around our founders’ dining table in Abu Dhabi. We then expanded into an intimate office in Sharjah, followed by a larger space in the heart of Dubai, and then returned to Downtown Abu Dhabi with a second office that retained our familiar desks, lighting, and drip coffee machine.
In the early years, building a company meant building the basics. Renting an office felt like a milestone. Filling it with desks, chairs, proper lighting, and a coffee machine was proof to us that the work was holding up. Small wins mattered, and they still do: new laptops, pens, and papers, and the satisfaction of seeing team members feel supported with fresh stationery and a good cup of coffee.
At the same time, for many years, Rouya also faced a practical constraint. As a small creative business, finding an affordable place within a creative community felt out of reach. We built beautiful offices across the UAE, often in older buildings that we value deeply for their character and architecture. These spaces held our work and furniture well, yet they were outside the cultural ecosystem where creative businesses naturally meet.
Being surrounded by a like-minded community often came with a cost that kept it out of reach. This gap shaped a reality – not often spoken about in mainstream entrepreneurial conferences- for many businesses like ours, that cultural work should flourish through strong partnerships, but access to the cultural community remained difficult to secure.
Throughout the years, we did try applying to a few other “creative districts”, most recently, the answer was a quick no! Our profile didn’t “meet the requirements.” That phrase stung a little, especially when you look at the numbers. Rouya has helped launch and support more than 30% of tenants in those very districts. As a company born and raised right here, we’ve shown up for the community again and again.
It would have been easy to feel bitter about the rejections. But honestly, the more we sat with it, the clearer it became: those doors closed for a reason that had very little to do with our track record. There’s this thing we talk about in our meeting room—we call it the “cultural kool aid.” It’s the polished version of culture that gets served up in glossy, transliterated brochures and overly curated events. We never drank it, because we chose something else: the slower, less photogenic work of showing up consistently, listening deeply to our community, and actually making a difference through our work.
We stopped knocking on doors that didn’t recognise what we brought to the table, and instead walked through the one that already felt open.
When Madar_39 opened in Mina Zayed, it stood out right away. The space launched with a real purpose: to stay connected to its history of mindful exchange and creative responsibility.
For us at Rouya, this mattered deeply. In a country filled with so many rental options, very few truly speak to small businesses and independent creators. Madar_39 felt almost too good to be true at first, but once we started working with them, it became clear.
Earlier this year, we bid and won the opportunity to support Madar_39 with their communication and narrative strategy. That partnership let us see everything up close and in real time. Their words matched their actions every single day. Every business goal stayed authentic and firmly grounded in actual practice, and our honest, open conversations with the team revealed a new way of working that, at its core, feels like a return to something ancient and true—the way we have always worked together in this region.
Madar_39 views support as a genuine exchange, and work as relationships that gather a community of creative builders through shared intention and mutual responsibility.
They asked us directly: What do small businesses really need? And what can we offer back to the community? Those questions quickly led to deeper alignment: What do you bring? How do you show up? What do you want to help cultivate while you are here?
That shift changed everything for us. Choosing a workplace suddenly became about belonging to a community, contributing meaningfully, and sharing creative responsibility.
When we first moved into the new office at Madar_39, we arranged it as a majlis. The seating encouraged everyone to face one another openly and share space naturally. We drew inspiration from our traditional living rooms: family photographs and paintings cover the walls—each carries personal meaning. Some are actual photos of our great-grandparents, while others are paintings created by our parents. A few are cherished photographs of places and cities our parents once called home.
An old television set sits quietly in the corner, and palm tree motifs run throughout as a gentle nod to our environment and heritage. Almost every item in our space came from suppliers based in Mina Zayed. If we talk about authenticity in our work, we want to live it through the smallest, most honest choices.
We wanted everyone to feel the weight and beauty of that setup — to remember that our founding father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, sat in majlises much like this one, holding discussions that shaped the future for millions.
The majlis felt completely natural here, because Madar_39, at its heart, already feels like a larger majlis that brings people together. Around shared dining tables and work desks, comfortable sofas, and a welcoming shared kitchen. Every day brings generous servings of coffee and tea, and beautiful fresh flowers grace every meeting room.
Now, the question we grapple with is how a narrative can actually live inside a physical room? Stories take shape through words, of course, but they also form through the way people occupy a space and a community. Upon opening our doors to the community at Madar_39, our neighbours noted that the space itself conveyed a sense of authenticity unmatched by any other, and to quote one of them, “it encourages us to listen and converse”.
We intended the space to speak of our story, and it is still a work in progress! I am personally not convinced about the two green Ikea armchairs we have in our space, but they also hold a deep meaning. They belong to the first set of furniture we were ever able to afford. We used to think of them as thrones, but now they feel out of place, I think.
Today, we are designing programming that aligns with Rouya’s purpose and narrative of unearthing inherited practices. We want to understand from the community their perspectives, listen to their stories, and engage with them in the way we know best: a cup of freshly brewed Iraqi tea and a good conversation. More on this soon.
The move into Madar_39 raised a deeper question about space and behaviour.
Can a place shaped by creative responsibility influence how a company conducts itself? Can it encourage people to work with greater empathy, simply by being surrounded by makers, artists, and independent thinkers? Can it shift how business is practised through proximity, familiarity, and shared daily life?
In Arabic, breaking bread carries a meaning beyond hospitality. Aish and meleh speaks to loyalty and community built through shared sustenance. In Madar_39, this spirit appears in everyday gestures, in the feeling of sitting together in the space, as naturally as a family might.
There is something raw about sharing space in this way. Sharing the same coffee machine, the same water dispenser, and eating together in the kitchen. These ordinary encounters reduce distance. They build trust through repetition, without anyone explicitly stating it.
This raises a wider question.
Can a model like this be carried across the region? Can creative growth be supported through spaces that emerge from their cultural and historical contexts? Madar_39 sits in Mina Zayed, in a district shaped by trade, heritage, and community. That setting gives the space a particular weight. It suggests that place matters, and that inherited practices still shape how people gather.
Part of the inquiry lies in the formula itself.
Is it the way Madar_39 communicates, through content that feels direct and human? Is it the programming, built for depth rather than scale? Is it the closeness between people, where those who run the space speak with honesty and familiarity? And what does that closeness create over time?
These questions remain open. They sit at the centre of what Rouya continues to explore through this experience.
