Kristina Bråteng

Founder & CEO, Architect

Kristina O. Bråteng is a Spanish-Norwegian architect and the founder of B8 Architecture. She grew up on the Costa del Sol visiting villas with her mother, who worked in real estate, studying how the rooms were arranged, which spaces caught the best views and why a house sat on its plot the way it did. She went on to study architecture in Spain, began her career designing private homes in Marbella and founded B8 in 2018, opening its Dubai hub in 2020. Today she leads a team of around 70 architects, interior designers, engineers and project managers across Dubai, Marbella and Madrid, with more than 100 projects in progress.

Her approach pairs the ease of Mediterranean indoor-outdoor living with the clarity and restraint of her Scandinavian roots. She starts with the plan: how people will move through a building, where they will gather and where they will want privacy. A courtyard can draw daylight into the heart of a home; a terrace can carry a living room out into the landscape. Materials are chosen for how they feel up close and how they change in the light.

Kristina built B8 around one idea: the decisions made in the first sketch should still be evident in the finished building. She personally leads the concept stage of every project, then works with the studio’s architects, interior designers, landscape designers and technical teams as it develops, across signature villas, private estates, penthouses and hospitality projects in the Middle East, Europe and beyond. At every scale, she returns to the questions she first asked on those early visits: how a place is laid out, what it makes possible and how it will feel to spend time there.

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