Dubai Villa

We took this villa on as a concrete shell. Everything inside it, from the position of a wall to the last chair, was decided from that point.

Forty thousand square feet in Dubai, designed with local architects and a landscape studio. The brief was for a house with the warmth and craft of a European one — material, layered and made by hand — rather than the polished finish common to new-build villas in the region. That ruled out buying the interior and meant building it.

Stone set the tone. Marble was found on repeated sourcing trips through Europe; the travertine in the hallways and bathrooms came from closer to home. Because the hallways are vast and open, the setting out mattered more than the material — every slab was planned so the floor reads as one surface rather than a grid.

The client's collection shaped a great deal of the design. A polished stainless steel wall sculpture by Timo Nasseri was recessed to sit perfectly flush with the plaster, a detail that had to be resolved in the structure long before it could be installed. Above the dining table hangs a chandelier we designed, made from 150 alabaster tubes.

Whilst some furniture was sourced in Europe, the rest was designed from scratch and produced by artisans in the UK and across the Continent, then shipped and installed to a programme we ran ourselves — a volume of deliveries that took as much coordination as the design.