Cubic Void VillaJumeirah 3, Dubai

The commission: Cubic Void Villa in Jumeirah 3

Cubic Void Villa is a four-bedroom house in Jumeirah 3 with 10,150 sq ft of built-up area. The programme is short for that area: a formal living room and a dining hall, a rooftop pantry, a guard room, a powder room, staff accommodation and a laundry. The studio's scope was architecture and interior design as one commission, and the stone volumes outside and the pale rooms inside were drawn as a single set.

The idea of the house is in its name: solid stone cubes for the upper floor, and beneath them a ground floor that is glass from end to end, so that the living rooms stand open to the pool terrace while the bedrooms sit above in shaded, solid volumes.

What Jumeirah sets

Jumeirah 3 is one of the three administrative communities that carry the Jumeirah name along the coast; it faces the ocean on one side, and older, large villas with private gardens make up much of what stands there. The plots are mainland ground, not free zone land and not a master developer's community, so the permit for a house comes from Dubai Municipality, whose Building Control and Building Permits Department publishes its own procedures for residential villas; a house is assessed under those procedures and not under the rules for multi-storey or public buildings. The application does not pass through a master developer first, as it would in a community run by Emaar or Nakheel, though a plot within a gated compound that runs its own management may need one more consent, which is checked for that plot before anything is drawn. Because almost every plot already holds a house, a commission here usually begins with one: reworking the plan within the envelope that stands, adding to it under the villa regulations now in force, or taking it down and building again on the same ground.

The coast reaches into the specification. Salt air decides the fixings, the external metalwork and the rainwater goods, and it decides that render and stone are judged by how they age rather than by how they look when new. The plots are tight and the streets narrower than a planned community would draw them, so a house is made private by its plan, its boundary and where it puts its windows, not by retreating from the road. LKYOOB is registered with Dubai Municipality as an Engineering Consultant classified to G+4 and files the application in its own name; its studio is in Jumeirah 1, a short drive from any plot on this coast.

How the house answers it

The privacy the district asks for is resolved in the section rather than in the setback. The upper floor is composed as stone cubes that cantilever over a fully glazed ground floor: the living rooms open straight onto the pool terrace, and the bedrooms above sit in solid, shaded volumes, so the glazing is at ground level, facing the terrace, and the floor above is closed stone. Seen at dusk, the ground floor reads as a lantern beneath the stone. The entrance court is glazed on both sides, with an olive tree standing between the glass walls beside the pool, so the garden is drawn into the plan rather than left around it; and the stone of the upper floor is the material this coast judges by how it ages.

Inside, the palette is reduced to oak, pale stone and dark marble. The family living room is oak and white with a low sofa; the dining room and kitchen take a dark marble island under an oak ceiling; the stair is lit from above, with a small planted court at its foot, so planting appears inside the house as well as at its entrance; a bedroom sets a green bed against a pale wall behind sheer curtains; and a bathroom is finished in terrazzo and pale stone with black fittings. The same few materials recur in every room, which keeps the interiors as quiet as the elevations.

Where the project stands

Cubic Void Villa is a design study. The images on this page are visualisations rendered from the studio's drawings, not photographs of a built house. The schedule records it in Jumeirah 3 with the area and programme stated above; The Green House, in the same district, and the studio's other houses on the Jumeirah coast are linked below, and the Dubai Municipality route a villa here follows is set out on the Jumeirah community page, also linked below.