Overlayered VillaAl Warqa, Dubai

The commission: Overlayered Villa in Al Warqa

Four bedrooms in 10,230 sq ft of built-up area, in Al Warqa, with a formal living room, a dining hall and a home gym, and the support rooms stated above. The studio's scope was the architecture alone, and the image published is of the outside of the house, from the street.

The name is the composition. One floor is laid over another in a different material, a box of black vertical slats above and white rendered walls below, and the house is read at the line between them, where the dark upper floor rests on the white base, with the garage cut into that base and the entrance lit between cacti and gravel.

What the site sets

A street, a white boundary wall and a courtyard behind them: that is the site the scheme is drawn for. The garage is cut into the base of the house on the street side, the entrance is set into the white wall, and the street sees the white boundary wall and the dark box above it.

Against that, the programme is compact: four bedrooms, a formal living room, a dining hall and a home gym, with the support rooms stated above, in 10,230 sq ft. Two conditions hold whatever the plot. The cooler months are lived outdoors, so the shade an outdoor room has, and how far it is sheltered, decide how much of the year it is used; and glazing on a west or south face needs deep shading or it takes the full afternoon load. The studio that drew the house is registered with Dubai Municipality as an Engineering Consultant classified to G+4.

How the house answers it

The upper floor is wrapped in black vertical slats, so the upper rooms are screened on every face at once, whichever of the corner's two streets the sun is on. The slats rest on white rendered walls, and the base holds what a street front has to hold: the garage is cut into it, and the entrance steps rise between cacti and gravel under the slatted floor above, lit at dusk. From the street the dark box over the white base is read plainly, with the garage and planting along the pavement.

The courtyard is the answer to the cooler months. Seen from inside the plot, the same slatted volume shelters an outdoor dining area under a pergola, so the outdoor room is shaded twice, by the floor above it and by the pergola over it, and the house that is closed to the corner is open to its own court. One material does both jobs: the black slat closes the house to the street and makes the shade the courtyard dines under, which is the overlay the name describes.

Where the project stands

Overlayered Villa is a design study. The images are visualisations of the scheme rendered from the studio's drawings, as the narrative above already says, and not photographs of a built house. The schedule records it in Al Warqa with the area and programme stated above, four bedrooms in 10,230 sq ft, and the visualisation shows the house from the street. The rest of the studio's work is on the projects page, linked below.