Bitta Jiu Jitsu in Abu Dhabi is complete. Zynk Design created the interiors for the club, which we first shared  earlier this year, and the finished photography has just arrived from the team on site.

The brief was a modern dojo that also works as a community clubhouse: somewhere members train hard, recover properly and choose to stay. Across two floors the club brings together a reception and retail wall, two dojos, a lounge and café, changing rooms and a recovery suite with sauna and cold plunge.

The design takes its identity from the light of Abu Dhabi. Large circular lightboxes hang over reception and the main dojo, giving the mats bright, even light for training, and the same circular form returns over the lounge and in the backlit Bitta roundels. The second dojo is more intimate, with a warm orange coffer set into a dark ceiling.

Off the mat the mood changes deliberately. The lounge is warm terracotta, timber and red upholstery around a single tree, a place to sit after class rather than pass through. Recovery is quieter still, with a timber sauna, stone surfaces and soft, low lighting.

That shift in mood is the commercial point. A club that only works on the mat has to win every member on price. One with a lounge people stay in and a recovery suite they come back for is selling a membership, not a class.

Zynk Design delivered strategy and space planning, concept design, design development and the technical design package, working alongside Bitta’s team and the local delivery team in Abu Dhabi. See Bitta BJJ for the full story. If you are planning a gym design or martial arts club where the space has to work as hard off the mat as on it, get in touch to arrange an initial consultation.