The Dental Clinic That Forgot It Was a Clinic

Studio Enligne reimagines the dental visit as a hospitality experience at AK Global Dent, Gurugram

Walk through the doors of AK Global Dent at Worldmark, Sector 65, Gurugram, and the first thing you notice is what is missing. The medicinal smell is absent. The clinical white is absent. The low-grade anxiety that most of us associate with dental spaces (the kind that sets in at the very sight of a waiting room), is conspicuously absent. What greets you instead is calm: warm materials, a curated stillness, and a receptionist— scratch that — a Front Office Concierge, who wants to know your preferred beverage and music before your appointment even begins! 

• Project Name:  AK Global Dent
• Typology:  Healthcare Interiors
• Location:  Worldmark, Sector 65, Gurugram, Haryana
• Area:  1,700 sq ft
• Design Studio: Studio Enligne
• Architect & Founder:  Ashna Chhatwal
• Studio Address:  Unit 322, Centrum Plaza, Sector 54, Golf Course Road, Gurugram
• Instagram: @studio.enligne
• Contractor: HVW (Harsh Wig)
• Photography:  TakenIn Studios
• Text: Tanushree Saluja

Located in a premium commercial complex housing corporate headquarters, curated retail, and international hospitality, AK Global Dent holds its own space in the company. The clinic draws patients from across the globe, many travelling specifically for treatment, and the space they encounter upon arrival was designed with precisely that in mind. With 1700 sq ft. and headed by Ashna Chhatwal of Studio Enligne, it sets out to do something ambitious: make patients feel genuinely at ease through a complete reimagining of their treatment-journey; from the moment one sets foot into the space to the moment they leave after their treatment,  as a designed, intentional, end-to-end experience.

The client's intention with the space was bracingly direct: create something that does not yet exist in this country. AK Global Dent already operated a well-regarded first clinic, but the vision for this flagship went well beyond a physical upgrade. It was to serve as a future-forward brand statement — a physical articulation of what progressive, patient-first dentistry in India could look like. The space, the client insisted, must not feel clinical. For Ashna, the brief translated into a single guiding question that the entire design process was oriented around, "we kept asking – at what point does a patient stop being a patient and start being a guest? That line became our design brief."

Received as a bare space, the shell offered no major structural freedoms; the building had strict intervention norms. What it demanded instead was intelligence in planning. Ashna approached the layout by first mapping the clinic's operations from the inside out: multiple site visits to the existing setup, detailed briefings with the Medical Consultants, and a careful study of how patients and staff move differently through a space. For the studio, the key to a complex spatial design such as this clinic, lies in a circulation plan that separates patients’ flow from staff flow entirely — a decision that is both operationally efficient and experientially significant. Patients are never confronted with the machinery of the clinic: the supplies, the sterilisation zones, the behind-the-scenes workings that would puncture the carefully crafted atmosphere. What they encounter instead is a sequence of considered pauses and transitions, each one pulling them gently forward without friction or confusion.

Reception anchors the first touch point. A coffee station sits adjacently, not incidentally — it is from here that a staff member brings a tray of beverages to patients as they settle in for registration. That registration process itself is a small act of hospitality design: patients are asked their preferred beverage, their choice of mouthwash flavour, their music preferences, and what they would like playing on the ceiling-mounted entertainment screens during treatment. A neck pillow. A blanket. Preferences noted, saved to a patient profile, and activated the next time they walk in. Imagine how cinematic it would be to listen to Anoushka Shankar’s sitar tuned to the harmony of your dental treatment! 

For the staff, a large ledge behind the reception desk houses all-day incoming Invisalign Aligner Packages & Dental Lab shipments of patients.

The waiting area then leads the patient to a 3D x-ray room, where a compulsory scan is conducted. Right opposite, a consultation room, or as they call it – a counselling room, welcomes the patient through a glass partition. This is where the basis of the prescribed treatment is first laid out. Notably, this room resists the conventions of a typical doctor’s setup: no bulky doctor’s desk, no clinical authority dynamic. Instead, a circular table top cushions the conversation, easing the anxiety a patient might feel right before stepping in for treatment.

Each of AK Global Dent's treatment rooms, referred to internally as dental suites, functions as a personalised chamber. On arrival, a screen greets the patient by name. Custom music fills the room. Screens mounted on the ceiling above the dental chair play the patient's chosen content: a television show, a sport, a film. The intent is straightforward and remarkably effective — to give the mind something to do, so the body can relax. One of the four dental suites is designed specifically for children and their paediatric dentists. Saturated in greens and filled with enough engaging distractions to hold a child's attention, it works quietly and cleverly — before they know it, the treatment is done.

This degree of personalisation required, beneath the polished surface, was an extraordinary technical undertaking. More than ten kilometres of wiring runs through the clinic's ceiling: an intricate, invisible infrastructure of conduits, pipes, and data lines that makes the seamless experience above possible. Managing the complexity of integrating heavy dental equipment, advanced service runs, and refined aesthetics — without allowing any of it to breach the visual calm — was one of the project's greatest challenges, Ashna acknowledges, and its most thrilling. "To design a space that performs spatially is one thing; to understand every wire, every dental unit, every service run, and then conceal all of it behind lead walls, is another."

At the far end of the corridor, the doctors' chamber occupies a position strategically removed from both patient and staff circulation — a private retreat within an otherwise choreographed flow.
Before exiting the clinic, a small pocketed space holds an L-shaped mirror and a monolithic basin in marble; a quiet but considered moment designed for new patients adjusting to their aligners, guided by a doctor. This mirror placement is deliberate: it allows both patient and clinician to coordinate on fit and comfort together, face to face.

Between the waiting area and the treatment suites, Ashna installed what has become the clinic's most talked-about design moment: the Smile Wall. A bespoke interactive installation made of metal rods bearing custom-made rotatable photo frames, it displays the before-and-after smile journeys of actual patients. Turn a frame one way: the before. Turn it the other: the after.

It is a piece of confident design intelligence. At the precise moment when a patient's anxiety is likely at its peak — the threshold moment, just before entering the treatment room — the Smile Wall offers visible, tangible evidence of transformation. It does, in a single installation, what the entire space sets out to do: replace fear with trust.

AK Global Dent belongs to a global conversation about the convergence of healthcare and hospitality design — a shift already visible in wellness retreats and premium health centres internationally, but rarely applied to the everyday, high-anxiety touchpoint of dental care. In the context of India's rapidly expanding urban healthcare infrastructure, the project makes an argument that is both timely and necessary: that design sensitivity and clinical excellence are not competing priorities. They are, in the most progressive practices, inseparable.