La Menara | Design Week Marbella

RESULT

Upon entering La Menara’s installation at DWM, the visitor embarks on a journey that blends art, ephemeral architecture, and nature. A theatrical scene is felt, where every texture, shadow, and plant acts as a symbolic gesture. Lightweight structures and vegetated pathways combine with exhibition furniture and water elements to condense a poetic landscape.

The balance between aesthetics and functionality becomes the protagonist, transforming the ephemeral into the enduring through its ability to evoke culture, environment, and emotion.

The exhibition space is arranged across platforms alternating between passage zones and contemplation areas, creating different scenes. Vegetal elements—shrubs, grasses, selected Mediterranean species, and medium-sized vegetation—frame the path, filtering the changing daylight and generating dancing shadows that evolve with the sun’s trajectory. Water appears as a reflection, small pond, or delicate sheet, providing visual and auditory freshness to the journey.

Every corner is designed to be viewed, photographed, and experienced during the event, but also to resonate beyond it as a testament to author-driven landscape design.

The outcome of La Menara’s proposal at DWM is a sensory experience integrated into the event’s aesthetic: a temporary garden that does not sacrifice depth, transmitting Marbella’s author-driven landscaping philosophy with the elegance, technical care, and ingenuity characteristic of La Menara’s work.

Within the framework of the prestigious design fair Design Week Marbella, La Menara’s exhibition proposal at DWM reveals itself as a temporary intervention with a lasting vocation: a garden that engages in dialogue with the creative identity of the event while projecting a visual memory beyond its temporal duration.

Situated in a context linked to the Marbella landscape, this space has been conceived to evoke emotion, provoke reflection, and tangibly demonstrate what landscape-applied design means.

MATERIALS

The materiality of the DWM project combines lightness and durability, the conceptual and the utilitarian. Modular surfaces—panels, mobile platforms, and lightweight structural elements—are clad or accompanied by natural finishes such as stone, treated wood slats, and integrated vegetative coverings. These materials were selected to meet both the temporal demands of fair assembly and the permanent aesthetics of contemporary garden design.

Panels or exhibition structures intertwine with integrated planters containing vegetation adapted to the Mediterranean climate, adding freshness, texture, and plant life to the setup. Planters can be elevated or incorporated into exhibition modules, acting as living furniture pieces within the event scene.

The floors combine rigid and permeable elements: modular pavement, light stone slabs, or temporary wooden surfaces for transit zones, and low vegetative mats or gravel in transition areas. The design incorporates discreet and efficient irrigation systems, suitable for temporary use but respectful of the environment and sustainable even after the garden ceases to be an active part of the fair.

Exhibition lighting plays a key role: adjustable spotlights, focused lighting on vegetation, and recessed fixtures in lightweight structural modules. Pond lighting creates a dance of reflections over the garden vegetation. At night, La Menara’s installation becomes a luminous installation with a dramatic and refined atmosphere, where light interacts with plants and materials to extend the experience beyond official event hours.

This technical and aesthetic use of materials makes La Menara’s DWM intervention an example of garden design in Marbella where innovation, contemporary aesthetics, and construction detail coexist in perfect harmony.

WORK IN PROGRESS

La Menara’s installation at Design Week Marbella was developed through a carefully planned process combining temporality and construction quality. The assembly was structured around modular platforms and vegetated pathways allowing continuous visitor flow, alternating transit areas and contemplation zones. Each exhibition module integrated vegetation, furniture, and water elements, assembled in a way that respected the Mediterranean identity and ensured stability and safety during the fair.

The choice of materials and construction techniques prioritized lightness and adaptability: mobile panels, treated wood surfaces, light stone slabs, and integrated planters allowed agile and efficient assembly while maintaining aesthetics consistent with contemporary garden design. Irrigation, focused lighting, and water elements were coordinated precisely so that every detail functioned from the first day of the fair, optimizing resources and ensuring an impactful visual and sensory result.

The construction process focused on achieving a harmonious integration between ephemeral architecture and nature, ensuring that the garden not only fulfilled its exhibition function but offered a complete emotional experience, where light, shadow, water, and vegetation engage visitors throughout the journey.

CREATIVE DESIGN

Each exhibition module integrates vegetation and sensory components: plant textures, reflective water, contrasting surfaces, and designer furniture functioning as part of the garden and part of the artistic message.

Spatial organization attends to the event’s aesthetic: clean, geometric lines define exhibition platforms, while soft curves and organic vegetation counterbalance this exhibition rigidity.

The journey invites participation: stopping by a plant installation, feeling a leaf’s texture, observing water reflected on a metal panel, resting under the shade cast by a light pergola.

The work with water is symbolic and functional: reflective mirrors and shallow sheets generate plays of light and perspective between exhibition pieces and the vegetative garden. In some modules, vegetation acts as a living backdrop for an art piece, while in others it serves as a subtle barrier for visual or acoustic privacy.

Selected vegetation is a deliberate mix of Mediterranean species, ornamental grasses, and medium-sized plants providing texture and movement diversity. These plant elements were organized in modular compositions that can be dismantled or adapted, maintaining aesthetic coherence with La Menara’s identity.

The creative design of the DWM project speaks of dialogue: between the design object (exhibition modules, art, furniture) and the green space, between the temporality of the fair and the permanence of a visual message.

Throughout the process, ingenuity was key to optimizing resources and surprising visitors with creative solutions. It is a proposal for ephemeral landscaping in Marbella that transcends its role as a temporary installation, combining technical innovation, natural beauty, and modern sensitivity.

The creative approach of DWM for the design fair is based on the intersection of art, landscape, and participation. La Menara conceived its installation at DWM as a livable piece, a garden-stage where visitors not only observe but walk, breathe, and interact.