Direct-to-Wall Printing for Body Abs Gym, Abu Dhabi
Body Abs Gym, a gym brand with ten branches, fitted out a branch in Abu Dhabi and wanted artwork on the walls of the training floor and studios — seven walls in all.
They did not want vinyl or wallpaper, and they did not want printed panels installed over the fit-out. Sun Studio printed the artwork directly onto the walls in place.
Project facts
- Client
- Body Abs Gym
- Location
- Abu Dhabi
- Scope
- Seven walls, one branch of ten
- Printing service
- Direct to wall printing
- Application
- Training floor and studio wall art
- Production
- Printed on site with the wallPen E2
The requirement
A gym is a hard room for a wall finish. The air is humid, surfaces get wiped down constantly, and equipment, bags and shoulders brush the walls all day. Vinyl in that environment lifts and bubbles at its edges, and a scratch in a vinyl graphic means replacing the panel; wallpaper fares no better in Gulf humidity.
The brief was durable and sustainable: artwork that is part of the wall itself, applied without fabricating and fixing panels — and without handing the fit-out over to installers while the branch was being built.
What we did
The wallPen E2 came to the site and printed each artwork straight onto the finished wall — athlete figures for the training floor, softer artwork for the ladies’ studio — with the ink cured as it was laid.
There is no film, no adhesive and no panel: nothing with an edge to lift in humidity, nothing to bubble, and nothing that has to be unscrewed and replaced if the artwork ever changes.
Because the print goes on after painting and needs no fixings, the crews finishing the branch kept working around it — no installation day, no disruption to the fit-out programme.
Technical considerations
Ink printed into the wall surface has no perimeter for humidity or a passing shoulder to attack, which is exactly the failure mode that rules vinyl out of gyms. A scuff on a printed wall is touched up; a scuff on vinyl is a replacement panel. And with no panel fabrication, no adhesive film and no offcuts, the direct print is also the leaner route in material terms — the artwork is simply ink on a wall that was already there.
The outcome
Seven walls that carry the brand’s artwork in the wall surface itself — nothing to lift in the humidity, nothing to replace after a scratch, and a branch that opened on schedule with the artwork already part of the building.