New buildings appear in Doha almost overnight. There are construction sites all over the city putting up huge steel and glass office buildings and hotels, shopping centres, apartment blocks, and villa compounds, employing tens of thousands of expat labourers.

I was particularly taken by this brand new showroom for an interior design company called Doble Ve, which I believe is Spanish for Double U in various Latin American countries.

The exterior design exhibits a strange mixture of ancient and modern, combining the clean tiled surfaces of a contemporary mortuary with the ostentatious grandeur of the Temple of Zeus in Athens.

I am fairly the certain that the width and height to not conform with classical architectural proportions and that the column should be fluted… and, of course, the pair of columns with the absurdly large acanthus decorated capitals don’t actually hold anything up.

Exterior design at Doble V is clearly somewhat unusual. With some anticipation, I will look inside soon to see if their interior design is as quirky.