№ 1.247
Cultural · Saadiyat
In execution · 2026
Saadiyat Cultural District — a 14-month engagement combining architectural concrete finishes, hand-applied tadelakt to interior galleries, and bespoke metal-leaf detailing across 18,400 m².
Most contractors stop where the paint begins. We don't. Al Madar MGM was founded in Dubai in 1979 to build the new city — and stayed long enough to learn its oldest crafts. Today the studio combines a working civil-construction division with a specialist atelier for plasters, gilding, murals and theming.
The model is unusual on purpose. A single trusted partner takes a project from foundation to final coat, with the same standards applied to a structural slab and to a hand-burnished tadelakt wall. Procurement teams describe it as the rare case where the contractor and the craftsman are the same firm.
Forty-seven years in, we are still a privately held UAE house — small enough to know every wall on every site, large enough to carry hospitality, cultural and government mandates at scale.
Low and mid-rise structures, refurbishments, additions. The engineering backbone — RCC frames, ground works, MEP coordination, completion.
Commercial · Hospitality · Retail · Residential. End-to-end interior delivery — partitions, ceilings, joinery, MEP, finishes.
Annual maintenance contracts, facilities, planned upkeep. We don't walk away after handover — many clients have stayed twenty years.
Venetian plaster, micro-cement, tadelakt, marmorino. Hand-applied, hand-burnished. The flagship craft offering — where most contractors stop, we begin.
Murals, artworks, gilding. 22-carat gold leaf, palladium, hand-painted ornament. A capability almost no contractor in the region offers in-house.
Polished, board-formed, exposed-aggregate. Cast-in-place finishes specified by architects who care about the seam, the line, the texture.
Epoxy systems, terrazzo, resin, micro-screed. F&B, retail, hospitality. Engineered for traffic, photographed for portfolios.
Architectural metallics, patinas, brass & copper finishes on substrate. Specified increasingly by hospitality and high-end residential.
→Themed environments for attractions, F&B, hospitality, retail. Sculpted GRC, faux finishes, set design crossed with permanent construction.
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View full archive ↗Established 1979. Forty-seven years of receipts in the UAE — palace projects, civic landmarks, hospitality, repeat clients. Our oldest active maintenance contract dates to 1991.
Civil to gilt under one roof. Most of our peers are either generalists or boutique finishers. We are both — which means a single contract from foundation to final coat.
We employ muralists, gilders, tadelakt artisans, decorative painters and theming sculptors. Where most contractors stop, we begin — and most of these crafts cannot be subcontracted at quality.
Privately held, family-owned, single-country. Every senior project manager has worked through at least one cycle of UAE construction — we know this market in its bones.
A working guide for designers and developers — how Venetian plaster, tadelakt and micro-cement behave under coastal humidity, AC cycling and direct sun.
Eighteen months on site, 38,400 m² of cast-in-place architectural concrete, and one of the largest hand-applied tadelakt programmes the studio has executed to date.
Live demonstrations of marmorino plaster, gold-leaf gilding and patinated metal coatings. Studio principals available daily for pre-tender consultations.