Park Ways Villa, Dubai Hills

At around 14,000 square feet in Dubai Hills, Park Ways is large enough that circulation becomes a design problem in its own right. The distance between the parts of a house that size is what decides whether it reads as generous or simply big.

Holding the whole scope in one team — interior, fit-out, joinery and furnishing — is mainly what keeps the detailing consistent from one end of a house like this to the other.

When circulation becomes a design problem in its own right, the corridors and the stair have to be treated as rooms rather than as links. Otherwise a house this size reads as a series of good rooms connected by nothing.

The joinery throughout was built in our workshop to measured dimensions, and the Emaar community's approvals and contractor access rules set the working programme.