Villa renovationin Dubai

Structure and layout

Taking down the wall between a kitchen and a living room, opening a double height, widening a run of glazing onto the garden. What carries load is established before anything is priced, and what is structural is drawn and submitted rather than agreed standing on site.

The wet rooms

A villa has several bathrooms and at least one kitchen, and they set the length of the programme. They are also where waterproofing is executed to Dubai Municipality standards — a bathroom on the first floor has a room underneath it, which a flat's rarely does.

Joinery, plaster and light

Wardrobes, a dressing room, a balustrade, a kitchen that reaches the ceiling. Then the false ceilings, the cove lighting and the plaster or microcement that make a house read as one hand rather than as a series of rooms done in different years.

Everything that is not the house

A driveway, boundary walls, a garden that has to survive the works, a shaded outdoor kitchen, a pool to protect or retile. None of it appears in an apartment quotation, and all of it belongs in a villa remodeling scope.

The staircase

It is the one element an apartment never has, and it is structural. Re-treading an existing flight is finishing work; moving it, opening a void or changing the rise is an engineer's drawing first.

Drawn rather than inherited, it gives back the middle of the house: a flight that turns where the light already falls, a soffit plastered as one curve, a handrail that is joinery instead of a catalogue part.

Inside meeting outside

Terraces, shaded kitchens and sliding walls are what a villa is for, and they are also where water gets in. Levels, falls and the tanking at the threshold are decided before the stone is chosen.

A floor that runs from the living room out onto the terrace in one material only reads as one room if the drainage was drawn for it. If it was not, it reads as a step nobody wanted.

The community, not the landlord

Most master communities — Emaar, Nakheel, Dubai Properties — want an NOC before anything starts, and structural work or an extension goes to Dubai Municipality or to the authority for that area. That is calendar time, and it is planned for rather than discovered.

Each community also sets its own working hours, its own rules on what may be touched on a facade, and its own answer on where a skip may stand. None of it is an obstacle once it is known. All of it is expensive when it turns up halfway through.

Living in it, or not

A villa is often renovated in phases because the family stays in it. That is a different programme from an empty flat: dust barriers, a working bathroom at all times, and trades sequenced around the household.

It costs more in sequencing than in materials, and it is worth saying at the first visit rather than the third. A phased villa refurbishment and an empty one are not the same job, and they should not be quoted as though they were.

Services sized for a house

Several air-conditioning units instead of one, a water tank, and a distribution board sized for the house as it was originally drawn. Opening walls or adding a room means checking what feeds them before anything is ordered — not after the joinery is on site.