The Green HouseJumeirah 3, Dubai
The Green House, a villa design study in Jumeirah 3, Dubai
A single-storey residence set into its garden, with olive courts, water rills and warm stone under a deep timber eave. Shown as design visualisations.
The Green House is a villa design study in Jumeirah 3, Dubai 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. The images on this page are design visualisations of the concept. They are not photographs of a finished building.
What did the brief for The Green House ask for?
The brief runs to 9,300 sq ft of built-up area. Four bedrooms, with a family living room, a formal living room and a dining hall in the brief, plus staff accommodation and a laundry.
The house is laid low and long, a deep timber eave drawing the eye along olive courts and thin water rills to a lit timber door. Planting is part of the structure: the garden rooms are drawn with the same care as the walls.
A courtyard terrace with lounge seating around a fire pit, an outdoor kitchen and dining table under a timber pergola, and a winged roof lit from below at dusk make up the rest of the set. Every image here is a design visualisation of the concept, not a photograph.
The commission: The Green House in Jumeirah 3
Four bedrooms, a family living room, a formal living room and a dining hall, with staff accommodation and a laundry, inside 9,300 sq ft of built-up area in Jumeirah 3: the programme of The Green House is short, and the house gives its area to a single storey and to its garden. The studio's scope was architecture and landscape together, and that pairing is the scheme. Planting is treated as part of the structure, and the garden rooms are drawn with the same care as the walls.
It is drawn as a single-storey residence set into its garden, warm stone under a deep timber eave, with olive courts and thin water rills, and a set of outdoor rooms that make up as much of the scheme as the house does.
What Jumeirah sets
Almost every plot on this coast already carries a house, so a commission in Jumeirah 3 is seldom a blank site. The district has the ocean along one side, and much of what stands there is older and large, villas with private gardens on land held for years; mature gardens are usual on ground held this long, and a house that keeps its established planting settles into its street sooner than one that clears it. The work therefore begins with a survey of what is on the ground, its levels, which structure can stay, how the boundary has fared and which trees deserve a place in the plan, and only then with the choice between reorganising the house inside its existing shell, extending it within the current rules for villas, or clearing the plot and starting again.
The permit comes from Dubai Municipality; its Building Control and Building Permits Department keeps a separate procedure for residential villas, and on this mainland ground there is no master developer to satisfy first. The municipality's Home First initiative, introduced for Emirati families, reset the figures an extension is drawn against: a villa may now come as close as 1.5 metres to the boundary, a rooftop floor must step back another 1.5 metres on every side, a full extension is permitted across the second floor, the setback between a service annex and the main villa has gone, an annex may rise to eight metres over two floors, and a separate villa for a son is permitted within the family property. Whether a given plot qualifies depends on the plot itself and on who holds it, so that question is settled before any drawing is made. LKYOOB, registered with Dubai Municipality as an Engineering Consultant classified to G+4, lodges its own application from a studio in Jumeirah 1 on the same coast.
How the house answers it
The house is laid low and long, a single storey set into its garden. A deep timber eave draws the eye along olive courts and thin water rills to a lit timber door, and a winged roof, lit from below at dusk, gives the low house its profile against the sky. In a district of older villas with private gardens, the scheme puts its planting first: the olive courts and the rills are as much the structure of the plan as the walls are. The house is warm stone under timber, and on this coast stone is chosen for the way it will weather, not for its first day.
The garden is used as a set of rooms. A courtyard terrace holds lounge seating around a fire pit beside a reflecting pool; an outdoor dining terrace sets a stone kitchen island and a dining table under a timber pergola; the entrance is a lit timber door framed by olive trees and water rills. On plots that sit this close, privacy is a matter of the plan and of where the openings go rather than of how far the house stands from the road, and a single storey gathered around a courtyard terrace keeps its outdoor life inside the plan. The entrance and the winged roof are both shown at dusk, the door lit and the roof lit from below.
Where the project stands
The Green House is a design study, drawn for its garden as much as for its rooms. Every image on this page is a visualisation of the concept; none is a photograph of a built house or a planted garden. The schedule places it in Jumeirah 3 with the area and programme stated above, in the same district as Cubic Void Villa; that house and the others along the coast are linked below. The Dubai Municipality route for a villa here, and the extension allowances a plot may qualify for, are on the Jumeirah community page, also linked below.
Design visualisations of The Green House
Radius House
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