The Audemars Piguet pavilion at Dubai Watch Week 2025 can be described not as a “booth” but as a separate museum of time. The House of Wonders occupies approximately 1,000 m² in Burj Park and is constructed as an independent journey from Dubai to Le Brassus. One of the largest and most striking structures of the fair, it functions as an architectural portal between the Swiss valley and the Downtown panorama, where Burj Khalifa and the fountains stand behind the glass, while inside, 150 years of the brand’s history unfold through rooms and scenarios.
Space and Architectural Gesture
The House of Wonders is positioned as a standalone building with a clearly defined silhouette and entrance, reminiscent of a reimagined historic Audemars Piguet house in Le Brassus. The façade works on contrast with its surroundings: warm wood textures and soft light against Downtown’s glass and metal, so the pavilion immediately reads as a “home” within Dubai Watch Week’s temporary city.
The interior is organised as a chain of carefully constructed chambers, each with its own rhythm of light, sound, and density of objects. The route is designed for visitors to move slowly. Corridors are not overloaded, perspectives unfold step by step, and visual accents are always at eye level, allowing one to literally “read” the architecture through watches and vice versa.
Route Concept: From Workshop to Universe
The House of Wonders scenario is built as a journey through thematic rooms, from a reconstructed workshop to more abstract spaces exploring the language of forms and astronomical complications. At the entrance, visitors pass through the image of Audemars Piguet’s historic headquarters: wood, details from old workbenches, the sound of pendulums, and antique clocks create a sense of artisanal density and slow time.
The route then unfolds sequentially:
• A hall dedicated to the Jura Mountains landscape and the Vallée de Joux, with cool light and visual references to snow, forests, and topography, explains the brand’s interest in light, metal texture, and contrasts;
• The Gallery of Time and Mechanical Secrets rooms showcase the evolution of movements and hidden mechanics through showcase architecture and enlarged component fragments transformed into almost abstract sculptures;
• The Vault of Design and Astronomical Observatory unite the language of forms, materials, and complications into a single route, connecting chronographs and astronomical calibres with diagrams, light lines, and models suspended in space.
Design, Light, and Décor as Brand Language
The pavilion has a clear visual code: wood and warm metal coexist with cooler, almost laboratory-like zones dominated by glass, white light, and enlarged movement fragments. Lighting is structured so that central objects are always gently illuminated, without glossy shine. This feels more like a contemporary art museum than a commercial booth, setting a contemplative rhythm rather than a “quick browse” of novelties.
Décor functions as a continuation of mechanics. Diagrams, relief maps of the valley, enlarged calibre details, archival drawings, and sketches are built into walls and showcases. Visitors constantly see how case lines, bezels, and integrated bracelets emerge from specific drawings and experiments. In halls dedicated to design, the evolution of Audemars Piguet’s language, from early classical models to radical Royal Oak interpretations and contemporary concepts, is laid out in one visual trajectory, where changes in thickness, proportions, and textures read almost like architectural blueprints.
Connecting History and Modernity
The pavilion curators carefully merge the archive and the present day into one line. Rare historical watches, early movements, and documents are displayed alongside current models, not in a “before/after” format but as a unified living system.
The Gallery of Time constructs the brand’s 150 years as a horizontal axis. Each stage of movement and collection development is anchored by concrete artefacts and visual codes, so past and present are perceived as different “rooms” of the same house.
The final space, the Cabinet of Curiosities, is dedicated not only to watches themselves but to collaborations: objects created at the intersection of art, music, design, and technological partnerships. Here, it becomes particularly clear how Audemars Piguet builds its cultural ecosystem beyond mechanics. On shelves and in showcases are small objects, installation elements, and collaboration artefacts that transform the pavilion into a catalogue of the brand’s relationships with the outside world.
Visitor Experience: Slow Time in a Busy Park
Against the general noise of Dubai Watch Week, the House of Wonders is constructed as a space of deceleration. Already at the entrance, the sound of old clocks and muted voices separates it from the fair rhythm outside. The route is arranged so visitors can follow it linearly, from workshop to observatory, or fragmentarily, returning to favourite halls: the room composition allows repeat visits.
From an architecture and design perspective, this is one of Dubai Watch Week 2025’s most memorable projects. Here, the pavilion form, lighting, exhibition solutions, and narrative about Audemars Piguet’s 150-year history coincide in one tempo and create the sense that the brand brought to Dubai not just a collection, but a fragment of its own geography and time.
You can learn more about The House of Wonders on its official web page.
