South African architect Sumayya Vally to design permanent home for Elie Khouri Art Foundation in Dubai

South African architect Sumayya Vally is designing the permanent home of the Elie Khouri Art Foundation in Dubai. Dezeen, the architecture and design website, reported the appointment on 11 November 2026.

The foundation was established by Elie Khouri, a Lebanese-French businessman. Its new home will be a renovated former villa in Jumeirah 1, a district on the coast of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

The building will have two kinds of space. The first is gallery space for the foundation's permanent collection, meaning the works it owns and intends to keep and show over the long term. The second is space for temporary exhibits, which run for a set period before they close and the works move on.

The permanent home is planned to open in 2028. Until then, the foundation's collection has no fixed address of its own, and the new building is meant to change that. A permanent space lets visitors come back to the same works again and again, rather than waiting for a show to pass through town.

Vally leads Counterspace, an architecture studio she founded and runs as principal, the senior partner who makes the final design decisions. Her name now joins the list of architects working on new homes for art across the world, from large public museums to smaller private foundations.

For the people who will carry the work in, the project will mean crates, climate control and careful installation, as well as drawings and budgets. Those are the parts of a building that visitors rarely see, but they decide how safely art can be moved, hung and kept.

The design is at an early stage. Dezeen's report does not say how much the building will cost, and no other details about the design have been announced. Any further word will come from the foundation and the architects themselves.