Swan Grid VillaAl Khawaneej, Dubai

The commission: Swan Grid Villa in Al Khawaneej

Six bedrooms in Al Khawaneej, with 12,400 sq ft of built-up area, and a programme with rooms for guests and rooms for the household alike: a formal living room and a dining hall, a home gym, a private cinema and a rooftop pantry, together with a guard room, a powder room, staff accommodation and a laundry. The house is a white villa with a timber-slatted upper floor over a travertine base, planned around an olive courtyard.

Architecture and interiors were one scope, so the courtyard, the glazed garden side and the stair were drawn in the same set as the entrance hall, the family rooms and the master bedroom, and one palette of pale stone, walnut and brass runs through them.

What Al Khawaneej sets

Al Khawaneej lies at the eastern edge of Dubai and is as much a farming district as a suburb, with private farms and agricultural plots set among the houses of its two sub-communities, Al Khawaneej 1 and Al Khawaneej 2. Ground is the district's defining asset. Plots recorded in Al Khawaneej 1 have ranged from roughly 11,100 to 20,100 sq ft and those in Al Khawaneej 2 from about 4,844 to 13,313 sq ft, and the houses are sized to match, roughly 4,000 to 15,000 sq ft with three to seven bedrooms. Depth is the design question the district puts first: a long plot handled poorly leaves a house standing in an empty margin, while the same plot handled well holds one outdoor room after another, a service yard that works without being seen and a garden the family uses rather than one the street looks at. A working plot also needs a vehicle route that keeps clear of the front door and a boundary that is private without making the plot feel walled in, and the house is sited for the land rather than dropped in the centre of the plot from habit. Orientation follows, with the daytime rooms shielded from the afternoon sun so that the garden can be used for a longer part of the year.

Dubai Municipality's permit procedures give private and investment villas a category of their own, and for citizens building their own homes the emirate runs a self-build route: accredited engineering consultancy offices submit the application and it is processed on Dubai's Building Platform, with no prior review by municipal engineers to wait for, provided the drawings comply with the Dubai Building Code and with the planning rules on use, setback, height and parking. Which authority licenses a particular plot is established before drawings begin, and the studio, registered with Dubai Municipality as an Engineering Consultant classified to G+4, lodges its own application once that is settled.

How the house answers it

The plan is a sequence of outdoor rooms, which is what a deep plot asks for. A courtyard holds an olive tree between glazed walls, and the garden side opens through full-height glazing to a terrace and a lawn, so the house has a court on one hand and a garden on the other. The garden side sits under deep timber eaves, drawn at sunset among olive trees, which is the shade the district's afternoons call for, and the entrance is reached across a water court under a deep canopy.

The street elevation stacks a white upper floor of vertical timber slats over a travertine ground floor, under a dark fascia and a deep timber soffit. Inside, the family living room sits under a chandelier of hanging glass pieces, a stair of stone treads rises beside a slatted timber screen, and the entrance hall with its tall timber door and stone floor, the family dining room with a long table and display shelving, and the master bedroom with a padded headboard wall and a seating corner follow one palette of pale stone, walnut and brass. The slats on the upper floor and the slatted screen beside the stair are one motif, and stone runs from the travertine base to the stair treads and the hall floor, so the street face and the rooms behind it read as the same house.

Where the project stands

Swan Grid Villa is a design study: the images are visualisations rendered from the studio's drawings, and they are not photographs. The schedule records it in Al Khawaneej with the area and programme stated above. The district's permit route, including the self-build route through accredited engineering consultancy offices, is set out on the community page linked below.