A backgammon table, not a backgammon set.
Most of what Dubai sells under the words luxury backgammon is a board — a beautiful object you carry to a table and carry away again. Tawla is the table. Walnut, brass and a resin that holds light after dark, made by hand in our Dubai atelier for the majlis.
A board is put away. A table stays.
Search for a luxury backgammon table in the Emirates and you mostly find sets: inlaid boards in mother-of-pearl and ebony, folding cases in leather, marble boards printed with a skyline. Some of them are superb. But they all share one habit — when the game ends, they leave the room, and the room goes back to having nothing in it.
The second thing you find is the antique Levantine game table: marquetry, bone and abalone, Syrian workshop traditions carried into Gulf villas. That is a real category with real craft behind it, and if a nineteenth-century vocabulary is what a room wants, it is the right answer.
Tawla is neither. It is a piece of furniture that happens to be a board — sized and finished to live in the centre of a majlis whether or not anyone is playing, and to change character when the lights go down.
Tawla
Walnut, brass and luminous resin. The playing field is set into the surface rather than sitting on it, so the table reads as a table from across the room and as a board only when you sit down to it.
- Materials
- Walnut, brass, resin
- Points
- Resin, luminous after dark
- Finish
- Hand-polished
- Dimensions
- Confirmed at commission
- Made
- To order, in Dubai
- Lead time
- From 4 weeks
Points drawn in light instead of shell.
Inlay is how a backgammon board has been made luxurious for four hundred years: you cut the shape, you fill it with something rarer than the wood around it, you polish the two flush. It works because the eye reads the contrast in daylight.
We use the same logic with a different material. The points are resin, and the resin carries light — so in daylight the table is a quiet dark field with brass edges, and after dark the geometry of the board appears from inside the surface instead of being reflected off it. The same piece, twice, depending on the hour.
This is the atelier's whole subject. Our signature table, Nebula, carries seven hundred hand-set fibre-optic stars and thirty-six touch zones that answer to a glass or a palm. Tawla applies the quieter half of that craft to a game that has been played in this part of the world for five thousand years.
One hundred and twenty hours, by hand.
Every piece we make is drawn before it is built, then drilled, threaded, poured in a single slow pour, and taken through ten grades of abrasive and two compounds until the surface becomes a mirror. Then it runs for a full night in the workshop before it is allowed to leave.
That is roughly a hundred and twenty hours of hand work, and it is the reason we quote from four weeks rather than from stock. We are not a furniture supplier with a warehouse. We make one table at a time, and each edition runs to twenty-five numbered pieces.
Built for the majlis, and for giving.
Tawla was designed for the room where people sit low, stay long and play between conversations. It suits a majlis, a lounge, a study, a yacht saloon — anywhere the table is expected to hold coffee and attention at the same time.
It also answers a problem the region knows well: what to give someone who has everything, at a wedding, a national day, or the closing of a deal. A commissioned table can carry an emblem, a line of calligraphy, or a star map of a particular night, worked into the piece rather than engraved on a plate attached to it.
- PersonalisationEmblem, calligraphy, star map
- Bespoke sizesUp to 3.6 m
- DeliveryUAE · KSA · Qatar · Kuwait · Bahrain · Oman
- Lead timeFrom 4 weeks
Is the price for the table or the pieces?
AED 7,500 is the starting price for the table, made to order. Dimensions, materials and any personalisation are confirmed in writing before we begin, and so is the final figure — there is no moving number once the commission is agreed.
Can I have it in a size that fits my majlis?
Yes. We build to the room rather than to a catalogue, and we work with your architect or interior designer where there is one. Bespoke pieces go up to 3.6 m.
How long does it take?
From four weeks. A plain commission sits near the front of that range, a piece carrying calligraphy or a custom star map sits further back. We give you a date when we confirm the drawing, not before.
Do you deliver outside the UAE?
We deliver and install across the Gulf — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, as well as the Emirates.
Commission a Tawla.
Tell us where the table will live and whether it should carry anything of yours — we will send the details, price and delivery time.