Atheel KAFD Hotel

Atheel is a Saudi luxury business hotel in the heart of Riyadh’s King Abdullah Financial District, designed by Foster + Partners and operated by Adeera. WithFeeling created the lobby soundscape, composed as an art installation rather than background music. The installation itself, ‘Riyadh’s We Grow’ by Artychoke, is shortlisted at the CID Awards 2026 MENA for Best Event, Pop-up or Installation Design.

A hotel lobby is the hardest room in hospitality to get right. People arrive tired, they queue, they wait for someone, they take calls, and they cross it a dozen times in a stay. Most lobbies answer that with background music, which is really wallpaper: inoffensive, forgettable and working no harder than the carpet.

Atheel wanted the opposite. In a Foster + Partners building at the centre of Riyadh’s King Abdullah Financial District, operated by Adeera, the brief was for a hotel lobby soundscape that belonged to the architecture and to the artwork above it, and that rewarded being listened to rather than merely tolerated.

We wrote it as an art installation rather than a playlist. The lobby is wrapped by a curved LED ceiling carrying ‘Riyadh’s We Grow’ by Artychoke, a slow procession of camels and desert light that travels across the room, and the music was composed to live with that work rather than underneath it.

That changes what you write. A lobby is not a pair of speakers, it is a tall marble room where someone may sit for an hour, so the piece had to hold up to repeat exposure without ever announcing itself, and it had to sit politely beneath a conversation at the desk. The sound and the ceiling were treated as one commission, so a guest reads them as a single idea rather than a screen with a soundtrack.

The lobby now has a piece of music that belongs to it and to no other building. Guests meet the same work whether they are checking in, waiting, or crossing to the lifts, and it moves with the artwork instead of looping back on itself.

‘Riyadh’s We Grow’ is shortlisted at the CID Awards 2026 MENA for Best Event, Pop-up or Installation Design.