The prestigious retail development at Porto Arabia is part of a larger development of an area of reclaimed land known as ‘The Pearl’ – a new marina based suburb of Doha city in the state of Qatar. Working with Tim Elliot and Carl Halliday of WRG to a very tight timescale, we had just three weeks to manufacture a series of ‘supersized’ Christmas decorations for various locations throughout the development.
The decorations consisted of a giant wreath, two Christmas trees and around thirty giant ‘presents’, all of which were to be transported to Doha via sea container. In order to accommodate this, each item was manufactured in components – 420 in total – to be assembled on site.
A giant 7m by 2m fabric and steel ‘ribbon’ bow was attached at the top with the whole wreath being attached to the building using brackets designed to fix onto the roof. The wreath consisted of seven individual steel sections, 5m by 2m, forming a large horseshoe shape reaching 16m at its widest and weighing in at 2 tonnes. It was fitted above Porto Arabia’s main entrance, the highest point reaching 25m off the ground. The steel frame was decorated with various elements including over twenty 1.5m wreaths, sourced from Lumalite.
The ‘supersized’ Christmas presents were located on the lawned areas in front of the retail units and consisted of a series of around thirty wrapped lidded boxes, tied with stiffened fabric ribbon. The presents were constructed from timber and ply and varied in size from 4m2 to 500mm2. They were ‘wrapped’ on site, using cloth specially printed with various scaled up wrapping paper designs.
We also supplied a 6m Christmas tree that was fitted into the middle of an ornamental pool inside one of the shopping mall concourses. This was manufactured in steel sections before being assembled on site and covered with foliage, garlands and baubles.
On the promenade of the marina, we installed a 12m Christmas tree, supplied by WRG, which required a specially constructed plinth. We also supplied and fitted further decorative garlands to 500m of existing handrail around the marina.
A crew of 15 took just four night shifts to install the items on site.
