Shadow HouseAbu Dhabi

The commission: Shadow House in Abu Dhabi

A six-bedroom house in Abu Dhabi with 13,820 sq ft of built-up area. The programme is written for a household that receives guests: a formal living room and a dining hall lead it, a home gym, a private cinema and a rooftop pantry follow, and the support rooms stated above complete it. Architecture and interiors were one scope, so the white volumes and the timber louvres outside and the rooms in walnut, pale marble and bronze inside come from the same set of drawings.

The house is drawn as white volumes banded with dark stone, with vertical timber louvres screening the first-floor glazing, and the interiors were designed with it rather than after it: a formal living room, a formal dining room, an entrance hall, a family living room, an open kitchen, a sunken lounge and the master suite with its bathroom, all in the same three materials.

What the site sets

The visualisations show the plot from the street. A low boundary wall and planting run along it, the house is lit at dusk behind that wall, and a driveway court is set to the side under palms, where cars arrive beneath a deep overhang. The street is the public side, and the plan has to hold a six-bedroom house and its support rooms behind one composed face. The louvres screen the first-floor glazing, and the programme carries a rooftop pantry above it.

Two conditions hold wherever the plot is. The cooler months are lived outdoors, so the shade a terrace has, and the number of rooms that open to it, decide how much of the year the outside of the house is used. And glazing on a west or south face needs deep shading or it takes the full afternoon load, which makes the screening of an upper floor and the depth of an overhang matters of comfort before they are matters of appearance.

How the house answers it

The house answers with screening and depth. The first-floor glazing sits behind vertical timber louvres, so the upper rooms take their light through a screen rather than through open glass, and the dark stone bands hold the white volumes together above the low wall and the planting; lit at dusk behind the boundary wall, the bands and the louvres are what the street reads. Cars arrive at the side of the house rather than in front of it, along a drive beside a lawn under palms, and the deep overhang they arrive beneath keeps the arrival in shade, so the street front is left to the wall, the planting and the composition above them.

Inside, the palette is walnut, pale marble and bronze, and it holds across every room of the scheme: the formal living room with a marble television wall, the formal dining room against a wall of walnut slats, the entrance hall with its stair, the family living room with a low sofa beside a glazed wall, the open kitchen around a dark island, the sunken lounge with built-in seating, and the master suite, a bedroom in dark timber and bronze and a bathroom with a freestanding bath. The walnut slats of the dining room repeat, inside, the timber louvres outside, which is the kind of correspondence that designing the architecture and the interiors together makes possible.

Where the project stands

Shadow House is a design study. The images on this page are visualisations rendered from the studio's drawings, and none of them is a photograph of a built house. The client's latest project details record the house in Abu Dhabi with the area and programme stated above, six bedrooms in 13,820 sq ft, and the visualisations show the house from the street and along the drive at sunset. The rest of the studio's work is on the projects page, linked below.