GTN SPOTLIGHT
Fayez Jazmati was six years old when he understood what his mother did for a living. She was sketching at a table, and he asked what she was drawing. Not drawing, she told him — planning; designing a building, and studying how people would live in it. That a few lines could become a real place stunned him. He decided, then and there, to become an architect.
He kept the promise. Today Fayez Jazmati DesignLink is the name behind that vision — he runs DesignLink, his own architecture and interior design studio in Abu Dhabi, built to produce work that holds up in reality and understands the culture it is built for.
A family business, long before it was a business
Jazmati came to architecture honestly. He is from a family of architects — both his parents and his younger brother design buildings, and at family dinners the conversation was drawings and space. He learned planning diagrams, he jokes, before he learned to draw cartoon characters. So when he began, whether studying or working, architecture came naturally.
His start in the profession was unusual. Most fresh graduates spend years assisting senior architects before they design anything of their own. Jazmati refused to wait. From his earliest jobs he pushed to be a designer, taking on extra work and making real financial sacrifices to earn the chance to design in every firm he joined — until he had earned it outright.
Why he started DesignLink
After years of concept work across studios in Abu Dhabi, Jazmati founded DesignLink to build the thing he actually believed in: designs of the highest possible quality, applicable in the real world, rooted in local culture and need.
For him the design stage is the cornerstone of a project.
“The design stage should be joyful, hopeful and full of positive energy — not just a means to a fee.”
That philosophy shapes how the studio works. Rather than treating the design phase as a formality to clear before construction, DesignLink treats it as the point where a client’s actual life gets built into the plan — how a family moves through a home, how light falls at different hours, what a business needs from a commercial space it hasn’t opened yet.
What DesignLink is working on now
The studio is currently working on several private homes, a set of commercial projects, and a residential masterplan. For anyone planning a build in Abu Dhabi, that mix — homes, commercial fit-outs, and masterplanning — reflects the range a design studio needs if it wants to grow past single projects into repeat, referral-driven work.
If you’re at the stage of setting up a design or architecture practice yourself, the Abu Dhabi business licence process through ADRA and TAMM is the same one Jazmati would have gone through to register DesignLink.
The bigger goal
The longer mission is bigger than any single project: to grow DesignLink from a small local studio into a global design brand that sits among the top architecture firms in the world. It is an ambitious target for a founder-led studio, and Jazmati is explicit that the goal is not just more work, but a name that carries weight internationally.
Jazmati is one of a wave of Abu Dhabi founders building service businesses from scratch — a path also taken by Al Areej Typing’s founders in business services and Aneesh Mon AK, who built Al Jibra Electricals from the ground up in the UAE.
What he wants to be remembered for
Ask what he wants to be remembered for and it is simple: a passionate architect whose work resonates with the people who live and work inside it.
His advice to anyone starting out is the advice he lived by: do not wait for your chance, create it. Step out of your comfort zone. And never give up, even when the goal looks out of reach. For someone who spent his early career refusing to wait his turn, that is not a slogan — it is how he actually built the studio he now runs.
What is the short version?
Fayez Jazmati grew up in a family of architects and decided at six to become one himself. He refused the usual path of years spent assisting before designing, choosing instead to push for design work from his earliest jobs. That approach built DesignLink, his Abu Dhabi architecture and interior design studio, now working on private homes, commercial projects and a residential masterplan — with a stated goal of becoming a global design brand.
GTN Spotlight
Features marked GTN Spotlight are published under a commercial partnership with the featured business.
