Homy Cozy
WhatsApp
Homy Cozy
WhatsApp
Villas are part of the work. The photographs are not yet: everything I have shot so far was shot in apartments. The trades are the same ones — what a villa changes is the scale, the stairs, the garden and who has to approve you.
Send two photosTwo photos of the room and the community you are in. That is enough for a straight answer.
Rooms I drew and built. They are apartments, and they say so. A villa is not a different trade — it is the same stone, the same joinery and the same light, over more floors.
The largest spaces in the corpus: open plateaus, a dining room under a serpentine cove, a walnut kitchen, a travertine bathroom and a glazed sauna.
These are stock photographs, not my projects — houses in Spain, Morocco and the Mediterranean, chosen for the work in them. They show what an apartment cannot: a stair, a courtyard, a room with space around the island.
The differences that are real, and that nobody mentions until the quotation arrives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The whole flat rather than one room: an apartment walked through room by room, and what a full strip-out covers.
Joinery to the ceiling, stone worktops, splashbacks, and the plumbing behind them when the layout has to move.
Travertine, freestanding baths, live-edge vanities — and the waterproofing nobody ever sees.
Offices, clinics, salons and shops: partitions, ceilings, joinery and the approval chain that comes with them.
The five steps, from the first two photos on WhatsApp to the day the keys go back.
Two photos of the space and the community you are in. That is enough for me to tell you what is realistic and roughly what it takes.
Open WhatsApp+971 56 969 8929