A HOUSE BETWEEN TWO LANDSCAPES
Dubai is a city that has mastered the art of spectacle.
For us, this house was an opportunity to explore something quieter — a home shaped not by the desire to announce itself, but by the desire to be inhabited, discovered and remembered.
The family who approached us were Indian. They had seen our work in Ahmedabad and felt an instinctive connection with its sense of climate, landscape and materiality. That became the beginning of the conversation.
We wanted the house to feel at home in Dubai, yet carry something of India within it.
The journey begins at the arrival.
One enters the Liwan — a triple-height space that is less a corridor than a moment of pause. It gathers the house vertically, bringing together sky, light and movement before releasing you towards the living Majlis.
The Majlis is deliberately understated. A grass-covered roof appears to float above massive expanses of shaded glazing. Beyond it, the landscape stretches towards the golf fairway of Dubai Hills Estate.
But the view is not simply framed.
It is discovered.
A Corten jaali bridge crosses the main courtyard, its perforated skin filtering the light and drawing the eye outward. From here, the fairway becomes a distant landscape painting — green slipping through the warm, rust-coloured lattice.
The courtyard is the heart of the house.
It is an oasis, deliberately planted and protected from the harshness of the Dubai sun. Water moves gently through it, its quiet bubbling becoming part of the acoustic landscape of the home.
Throughout the house, Indian art and objects inhabit the spaces without becoming decoration. They bring another layer of memory — fragments of a culture carried across geographies and allowed to converse with the architecture rather than sit upon it.
And then, almost unexpectedly, the house descends.
A staircase leads to a subterranean Sukhabhumi — a world of water, stone and shadow.
The pool is concealed below ground, discovered rather than displayed. Its architecture recalls the baodis of Mandu: spaces where water was not simply contained, but celebrated through descent, coolness, proportion and silence.
Here the temperature changes.
The light softens.
The sound of water takes over.
The desert outside becomes distant.
This is perhaps the central idea of the house — not to recreate India in Dubai, nor to make a statement about either place, but to allow memories of one landscape to find new meaning within another.
Climate becomes architecture. Landscape becomes room.
Art becomes memory.
And water becomes refuge.
The house is therefore less an object than a sequence of discoveries — shaded, green, tactile and quietly theatrical.
A contemporary Indian home in Dubai, perhaps, but one that ultimately belongs to neither place entirely.
It belongs to the family that will inhabit it.
