Home Box's 'The Hidden Room': a furniture range for domestic workers' tiny rooms

Home Box, a Middle East furniture and homeware retailer, worked with Leo Burnett Dubai to ask 329 live-in domestic workers about their favourite places in the homes where they work. The workers described living rooms, kitchens and gardens across the Gulf's towers and villas — but not one of them mentioned their own room. That silence became the campaign: a space that existed in every grand home yet was invisible to the furniture industry.

The room in question is small — typically around 7 by 10 feet (about 2.3 by 3.3 metres), often smaller — while the furniture category sold oversized sofas and beds for showpiece living spaces. Home Box's design team created The Hidden Room Collection, storage-focused furniture, prints and soft furnishings engineered for those dimensions. The launch, timed to Eid al-Adha 2022, paired the range with a documentary-style film following four workers — Wasanti, Melat, Queenie and Resha — and a second film showing how the collection transforms a small room.

The collection was sold in Home Box stores across the Middle East, with both films driving to a dedicated page. The work was also argued as a business case: it won the Creative Commerce Grand Prix at Dubai Lynx 2023 and, after a year of results, the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at Dubai Lynx 2024 — recognition that the idea changed how a retailer earns, not just how it talks.