Desert Geometry VillaNadd Al Hamar, Dubai

The commission: Desert Geometry Villa in Nadd Al Hamar

Eight bedrooms in Nadd Al Hamar, with 22,500 sq ft of built-up area, and around them a formal living room and a dining hall, a home gym, a private cinema, a rooftop pantry, a guard room, a powder room, staff accommodation and a laundry. The studio's scope was the architecture, and the house is drawn as stone-clad boxes cantilevered over white walls, with a dark entrance canopy, vertical fins and a courtyard terrace.

It is shown from the outside only, from the garden at sunset and from the street, so the composition is read in white walls, louvres and screens rather than in rooms.

What Nadd Al Hamar sets

Nadd Al Hamar is a pocket of about 8.4 square kilometres to the east of Ras Al Khor, bounded by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Road on the east and Ras Al Khor Road on the south, with some 454 villas, a number of apartment buildings and a strip of light industry inside it. The typical villa plot is an individual holding rather than a lot inside a master plan, but named projects account for parts of the area; among them Nad Al Hammar Gardens, where wasl released freehold plots for houses, mixed use, showrooms and schools. Those plots will carry buildings taller than the villas beside them, and for a house close to that development the consequence follows: upper terraces, roof rooms and bedrooms on the first floor are positioned for the skyline that is coming rather than the one there now, courtyards, screens and planting take over wherever a boundary wall by itself will stop giving privacy once taller neighbours are built, and the main garden face of the house is turned to the quieter side of the plot. The district to design for is the one that is coming rather than the one on the ground today.

Ownership is settled for the plot rather than for the district, since the district at large is counted among Dubai's non-freehold zones, where only UAE and GCC nationals may buy, whereas the Gardens plots went to market as freehold. The permit itself is a Dubai Municipality matter, issued through its Buildings Regulation and Permits Agency under procedures that cover both private and investment villas, and a plot that belongs to a developer's project brings that developer's management into the sequence before any drawing is prepared. The studio, registered with Dubai Municipality as an Engineering Consultant classified to G+4, lodges its own application.

How the house answers it

The house is made of the three devices a district whose skyline is changing calls for: a courtyard, screens and planting. A courtyard terrace sits under a lit soffit, an outdoor room held inside the composition rather than along a boundary. The garden elevation carries a balcony behind white fins, which is the screened upper terrace a plot with taller neighbours coming asks for, and a row of vertical fins under a dark canopy marks the entrance, where the door sits beneath a stone canopy. Cypresses line the side elevation beside a glazed corner, planting doing along that side what the fins do on the facade.

The upper volumes project past the white walls below them, and from the street the house reads as white volumes with timber screens behind desert planting and palms. A house of 22,500 sq ft is of a different order from the villa stock the district records, so its scale is composed in those cantilevered boxes rather than borrowed from the street, and the boxes, the fins and the canopies are the whole of its language.

Where the project stands

Desert Geometry Villa is a design study: every image is a visualisation rendered from the studio's drawings, and none is a photograph. The schedule records it in Nadd Al Hamar with the area and programme stated above. The district's approvals route, and the question of which plots are freehold, are set out on the community page linked below.