The Cube 61Dubai
The Cube 61, a completed villa in Dubai, the UAE
A completed six-bedroom villa in travertine, dark walnut and black stone, planned around a courtyard pool and photographed at completion.
The Cube 61 is a completed commission in Dubai, the UAE, designed by LKYOOB, an architecture and engineering company in Dubai, registered with Dubai Municipality as KYOOB ENGINEERING CONSULTANCY L.L.C, an Engineering Consultant classified to G+4. Every image on this page is a photograph taken at completion.
What did the brief for The Cube 61 ask for?
The brief runs to 10,700 sq ft of built-up area. Six bedrooms, staff accommodation, a home gym, a private cinema, a rooftop pantry, a formal living room, a guard room, a dining hall, a powder room and a laundry and ironing room.
The Cube 61 is a private house of travertine, dark walnut and black stone, planned around a courtyard pool so that the dining room and the family rooms look onto water rather than onto the street. Towards the road it presents a composed, closed face of travertine, dark timber slats and a lit boundary wall, photographed at dusk beside a neighbouring villa the studio also designed.
Inside, the kitchen is a black stone island with bar seating under dark walnut cabinets; fluted walnut lines the passages, and the bathroom doors pivot in the same timber; a travertine feature wall is washed by uplights; and a full-height dark pivot door stands in the entrance hall behind sheer curtains. The photographs on this page were taken at completion; the studio's later visualisation of the house is labelled as one.
The commission: The Cube 61 in Dubai
A six-bedroom house in Dubai with 10,700 sq ft of built-up area, and one of the studio's two photographed commissions: staff accommodation, a home gym, a private cinema, a rooftop pantry, a formal living room, a guard room, a dining hall, a powder room and a laundry and ironing room. The scope was architecture, interiors and landscape as one commission, so the courtyard pool, the joinery and the elevations were drawn by one team.
What Dubai sets
The building permit for a villa on a mainland plot in Dubai is issued by Dubai Municipality, through its Building Control and Building Permits Department, and the municipality's villa rules keep a minimum setback of 1.5 metres, with a further 1.5 metres for rooftop floors. Where a plot sits inside a community that has a master developer or management of its own, a consent from that party is settled before the drawings are finished, and that is read for the plot itself rather than assumed from the address.
The studio, registered with the municipality as an Engineering Consultant classified to G+4, prepares and lodges the application itself, from its own studio in Jumeirah 1.
How the house answers it
The plan turns inward. A courtyard pool sits at the centre, and the dining room and the family rooms face it through full-height glazing, so the house is private to the street and open to its own water and light. The street elevation is travertine and dark timber slats behind a lit boundary wall, with a dark canopy over the upper window; at dusk the house and the neighbouring villa the studio also designed read as one composition.
Inside, black stone, dark walnut and travertine do the work: a black island with bar seating under walnut cabinets, fluted walnut on the passage walls and the bathroom doors, a travertine wall washed by uplights, and a dark full-height pivot door in the entrance hall.
Where the project stands
The Cube 61 is built. The photographs on this page were taken at completion in 2024 by a professional architectural photographer, and the house is one of the two photographed commissions on this site; the one visualisation here, and every image on every other project, is labelled as a visualisation. The client's latest project details record the house in Dubai with the area and programme above. The rest of the studio's work is linked below.
Photographs of The Cube 61
Sand House
Completed 2024View project