The studio
LUMI Interiors is an interior design studio with its principal studio in the UAE, founded and led by Alua Kul. The work is private residential and hospitality: Silk Leaf, a large private residence in Abu Dhabi completed in 2025; Urban Retreat on Palm Jumeirah; Maison Orée; the W Residences in Dubai.
The team is international and a good number of them trained in London, which turns out to matter commercially. Clients come to LUMI for a particular restraint they describe as a London sensibility, delivered by a studio that actually understands the Gulf.
I have run social, content and search for LUMI since early 2026. They are the first and largest Dubai client on my books, and currently the only client I do SEO for as well as social.
Where it started
The account had a good body of work on it and a reach of 5,529 people a month.
That is not a criticism of what was there. It is the ordinary position of a studio whose best material is made by people whose actual job is designing buildings. The photography existed. The projects were worth talking about. What was missing was the apparatus around them: a plan, a voice written down, a rhythm, and somebody whose job it was.
Three decisions that did most of the work
One. Two voices, not one.
Most studio accounts are written in a flat corporate plural. We are delighted to share. We are proud to announce. It reads as nobody in particular.
LUMI now runs two clearly separated voices. Anything about Alua’s own eye, her travel, her decisions and what she noticed is written in the first person singular, as one person talking. Process, the team and the work stay in the studio’s plural. The rule is simple enough to apply without me: if she personally did it or chose it, she says it.
Two. Longer captions, deliberately.
My working guidance across most clients is 300 to 800 characters. For LUMI we raised the ceiling to roughly 1,200 to 1,500.
That came out of analysing an account the studio admires, Sophie Paterson Interiors, and separating what transfers from what does not. What transfers: first person throughout rather than the studio as default subject, the reasoning made visible so the reader learns something, a genuine question at the end, brand relationships framed as long-standing rather than as a visit, and a willingness to show the unfinished. What we left behind on purpose: the emoji, the word luxury, the exclamation marks, the breathless register.
The caption craft transfers. The scale does not, and I said so rather than letting anyone assume otherwise.
Three. Serialise, do not announce.
The strongest structural advantage a design account can have is a story that runs over months, so people come back for the next instalment instead of scrolling past another finished project.
LUMI’s is Kips Bay Decorator Show House Dallas. One room, a deadline, an install, a public reveal. The studio was named in the twenty-one-studio cohort in September 2026, the room was revealed as Julia’s Private Escape on 27 October, and the work with Artistic Tile and Il Granito on the bathroom has been going out as it happens. It is being run as a serial rather than as three separate announcements, and the numbers below show what that is worth.
What actually happens each month
- A client-facing weekly grid, planned Monday to Friday, with every caption written in full rather than briefed
- Separate captions per platform, because what works on Instagram does not work on LinkedIn
- A notes row on every post for Alua, which she uses to approve, redirect or reject an image before anything is scheduled
- Scheduling across six platforms: Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook and, since the end of October, Threads
- An analytics tab updated monthly against a fixed baseline, and a performance report tab with a month selector, top posts per platform and audience breakdowns
- Content capture when I am in Dubai, shot and edited by me rather than briefed out
The point of writing captions in full rather than briefing them is that the voice holds. A brief produces an approximation of the voice. Writing it produces the voice.
The half nobody sees
Search is the quieter part of this account and arguably the more durable one.
- Image metadata across the portfolio. Alt text, captions, long descriptions and titles for projects including Maison Orée, the W Residences and the Palm Jumeirah villa. Tedious, invisible, and the thing that makes a portfolio legible to a search engine and to an AI assistant rather than being a wall of unlabelled photographs.
- Hosting. I advised on and documented a migration for an image-heavy WordPress portfolio, with the comparison written up for the studio rather than kept to myself.
- Pinterest, restructured. The boards were all named after projects, which nobody searches for. They are now named for what people actually type, with the project name kept: Warm Neutral Interior Ideas, Urban Retreat. Same work, findable.
- A Substack that feeds the site rather than competing with it. Substack outranks almost any studio domain, so republishing in full risks the copy outranking the original. LUMI Edit runs curated excerpts that link home.
The crossing
This is the part that is hardest to buy from anybody else, and it is the reason the relationship works.
LUMI is a Dubai studio opening in the United States. In September I covered London Design Festival on the studio’s behalf. In October I was in Dubai filming Alua in the studio. In November I am in Dallas for the Kips Bay install and the reveal. The same person is holding the voice, the standard and the record in all three places.
The usual alternative is a Gulf agency, a US agency, and nobody who can see the whole picture. Three versions of the brand, three reporting formats, and a studio spending its time translating between them.
Results
- Monthly reach from 5,529 to 26,632 by month three, and holding at that level since
- 21,948 Instagram followers as at 29 October 2026
- Close to 27,000 people reached in October 2026, with 2,132 accounts engaging with the content
- The three highest-reaching days of October were the Kips Bay reveal and the days either side of it, which is the serialisation argument made in numbers rather than asserted
- Six platforms running, from a starting position of one that was properly active
- Named in Business of Home’s news digest in September 2026 as part of the Kips Bay Dallas cohort
Method: figures read from Metricool on 30 October 2026, covering the twenty-four days in October for which Instagram reported complete data. Reach is account reach across all formats as Instagram reports it. The 5,529 and 26,632 figures are from the studio’s own tracker and have been published on this site since September 2026.
What is next
The Kips Bay room opens to the public in November and runs for about three weeks, which is the first real test of whether a serialised story converts attention into enquiries rather than just into reach. After that, the US presence needs building properly rather than being carried by one show house, and the search work needs to catch up with the social, because the portfolio is now legible and the written content around it is not yet.
If you are a studio opening in a second market and recognise the problem, that is the thing I am actually for. The fractional direction page explains the senior version, and a short brief is the easiest way to start.