Luxury Villa Interior Design in Dubai Hills Estate
A five-bedroom Majestic golf-frontage villa in Dubai Hills Estate. Bare shell handed over from Emaar. Total interior floor area: 6,200 square feet across three floors. Scope: full turnkey fit-out from structural configuration to furnished handover, including Emaar NOC management, a custom Italian kitchen, full Crestron smart home integration, outdoor pool and covered terrace. Project timeline: 22 weeks from brief to handover. Specification tier: luxury.
01. The Brief
The clients, an international executive family with homes in London and Dubai, had purchased the Majestic villa off-plan two years before handover and had been living with the design concept in their minds throughout the construction period. Their brief was specific and ambitious: a family home that would serve genuinely as the primary residence for a household of two parents and three children aged 6 to 14, whilst being elegant enough to host formal business entertaining and impressive enough to reflect the quality of the property’s address and its direct golf course frontage. The kitchen and the family room were to be the heart of the house, designed around daily family life rather than around the formal entertaining function. The living room, dining room and study, all facing the 9th fairway of the Dubai Hills Golf Club, were to be designed with the golf course view as the primary design driver at every point. The master suite was to be a sanctuary: spa-quality bathroom, a dressing room large enough to serve a full wardrobe for two adults with significant formal and business attire, and a sitting area facing the golf course for quiet morning coffee before the household woke.
02. Challenges & Solutions
The Emaar base-build configuration of the Majestic villa positioned the kitchen as a semi-closed room separated from the family room by a non-structural partition wall, producing a layout that was architecturally correct but functionally inadequate for a family that wanted a genuinely open kitchen-family-dining arrangement. The removal of this partition wall required both an Emaar community NOC and a DM structural permit, both of which Kat Black Design Studio submitted simultaneously at the beginning of the design phase. Both approvals were received within the programmed 5-week permit window, without delaying the construction start. The resulting open-plan kitchen-family-dining space of approximately 65 square metres became the home’s defining room: a kitchen of sufficient scale for genuine family cooking, a family seating area with direct connection to the covered terrace and pool garden, and a dining table for 10 that could serve both family dinners and client entertaining equally.
The Majestic villa’s rear elevation faces the 9th fairway across a continuous glazed rear wall at ground and first floor. The design challenge was managing the intense afternoon western sun that strikes this elevation from approximately 2 pm in summer whilst preserving the quality of the golf course view throughout the day. A Crestron-integrated Lutron motorised blind system in a Soltis 92 translucent solar-control fabric was installed across all rear-facing glazing, capable of being lowered to reduce solar glare to an acceptable level whilst maintaining full visual transparency to the course. The blind colour, a warm sand-grey, was selected to complement the course’s green and gold colour field when viewed through the deployed fabric. The front-of-house glazing received a Soltis 86 fabric in a warm ivory providing higher privacy at street level.
Installing a full Crestron whole-home system across three floors of a villa that had been handed over from Emaar with no smart home cabling infrastructure required a first-fix cabling programme of approximately 4 weeks before any plastering could commence. The Crestron system covers all lighting circuits on all three floors, all motorised window treatment zones, 4-zone HVAC management, a 7-seat home cinema on the third floor with a 4K laser projector, multi-room audio to 12 rooms, pool and garden automation, security cameras and access control at the main gate and all external doors. The entire infrastructure is invisible within the building fabric: no surface conduit, no visible cable runs and no equipment in any living space.
03. The Concept
The design concept for the Majestic villa was expressed as a single design principle: the golf course is the room. Every design decision in the principal rooms on the rear elevation was made in service of the quality of the relationship between the interior and the course. The palette of warm stone, linen, brushed oak and warm white was not chosen as a decorative preference but as the correct tonal response to the course’s specific colour field: the warm greens of the Bermuda turf, the pale sand of the bunkers, the silver-blue of the water features and the deep blue of the Arabian Gulf visible in the middle distance from the first floor. A palette of stronger or cooler tones would have competed with this view; a palette of warm naturals extends and complements it.
The golf course palette was applied consistently throughout all three floors, with the principal floor (ground floor) using the most premium material expressions of the palette (Jerusalem Gold limestone floors in the reception hall and dining room, Mafi white oak in the family room and kitchen), the first floor using a warmer and more domestic expression (wide-plank brushed oak throughout, woven grass-cloth wall panels in the master bedroom), and the third floor cinema and study using a deeper and more saturated version of the same warmth (smoked oak flooring, tobacco-toned leather wall panelling in the cinema, a rich cognac velvet upholstery in the study).
05. Result
The completed Majestic villa is the fullest expression of the golf lifestyle interior design approach that Kat Black Design Studio has developed across its Dubai Hills portfolio. The kitchen-family room functions exactly as briefed: a genuinely active cooking space with a restaurant-quality appliance suite that the family uses daily, connected without interruption to the covered terrace and pool garden where the children spend the outdoor season. The golf-facing principal rooms on the ground and first floors achieve the quality of the view experience that the brief demanded: from every principal seat in the living room, dining room and master suite, the 9th fairway reads as the room’s primary visual event, framed by the villa’s architecture and complemented by a palette that makes the view look more extraordinary, not less, for the interior’s presence around it.
The Crestron system has performed without a single fault in the 14 months since handover, and the studio’s remote monitoring capability has allowed two HVAC configuration adjustments and one lighting programme update to be delivered remotely during the clients’ 4-month summer absence without a single on-site visit being required.
“Kat Black understood the brief from the first meeting in a way that I did not expect. They knew the Majestic base build better than I did, they had the Emaar NOC in process before I had finished reading the contract, and the result is exactly the home we imagined during the two years we waited for the keys. The kitchen is the best room in the house. The view from the living room still makes me stop when I walk in.”
Private client
Majestic, Dubai Hills Estate
Kat Black Design Studio has completed projects across Dubai Hills Estate, Palm Jumeirah, Emirates Hills, DIFC and beyond. If you are ready to discuss your interior design, renovation, fit-out or landscaping project anywhere in Dubai or the UAE, request a complimentary consultation today, with no obligation.
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