Photographing Jeddah's Restaurant Scene for Lines Kuwait: Dear Duck and Blak Peco
A few months ago, Lines Kuwait commissioned me to travel to Jeddah and photograph two of the city's most talked-about restaurants: Dear Duck and Blak Peco. Saudi Arabia's dining and hospitality design scene has been moving fast over the past few years, and spending time inside these two spaces made that growth easy to see up close.
Lines Kuwait is a multidisciplinary design studio behind some of the region's most distinctive restaurant concepts, working across branding, interior design, and architecture. Being brought in to document two of their Jeddah projects gave me a close look at how different a restaurant's design language can be from one concept to the next, even within the same city and the same design studio's portfolio.
Dear Duck: Color, Patterns, and a Fresh Take on Hospitality Design
Dear Duck sits in La Paz Plaza, in Jeddah's As Salamah district, and its design doesn't try to blend in. The restaurant leans into a bold, vibrant yellow used across its façade, furniture, lighting fixtures, and tile work, paired with a fresh, playful design that blends California-inspired ease with Parisian-style detailing.
What stood out most while photographing the space was the layering: patterns, materials, and textures mixed with confidence rather than restraint. Booth seating, greenery, and an open kitchen all sit inside a space that feels considered down to the smallest detail, while still reading as relaxed and inviting.
Blak Peco: Spatial Division and Lighting as a Design Element
Blak Peco, located in The Grid complex in Jeddah's Al-Zahraa district, takes a completely different approach. Rather than one open dining room, the restaurant is organized into three distinct spaces, each with its own mood and seating style.
Lighting does a lot of the storytelling here. Rather than treating light as a purely functional element, Blak Peco uses it as a design tool in its own right, shaping how each space feels and how guests move between them. Photographing a restaurant built around distinct spaces like this meant treating each one almost as its own shoot, while still keeping a consistent visual language across the full set of images, so the restaurant reads as one cohesive concept rather than several disconnected rooms.
Old Jeddah: Where the City's Design Story Really Begins
After finishing both shoots, I spent time walking through Al-Balad, Jeddah's historic district and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2014. It's hard to overstate how different it feels from the restaurants I'd just photographed, and how much it puts Jeddah's current design energy into context.
Al-Balad's coral stone tower houses, with their carved wooden rawasheen balconies projecting over narrow streets, represent centuries of Hijazi architecture built specifically for this coastline's heat and humidity. Many of these buildings are now part of an active restoration effort led by the Jeddah Historic District Program, working to preserve the original coral stone and hand-carved woodwork rather than replace it.
Standing in front of facades that old, in a city whose restaurant scene is moving as fast, was a reminder that Jeddah's design identity is being written on two timelines at once, one centuries old, one being built right now.
If you're a design studio or hospitality brand working on a restaurant, hotel, or commercial concept in Saudi Arabia or the wider Gulf region, I'd love to talk about documenting it.
