A private house on a compact plot in Dubai, planned around a double-height living room and the stair that descends into it.
The site is narrow and overlooked on three sides. Dune Atelier turned the house inward, putting the pool and terrace on the fourth side behind full-height glazing, and organised every internal view toward it. The stair became the instrument for doing that. Rather than tuck it against a wall, the practice ran it across the void, so the descent takes you along the length of the living room with the water in front of you.
Treads are a dark grey-brown marble with heavy white veining, each one a single slab with a mitred nosing, laid so that the veining runs continuously from tread to tread. Getting that alignment required the whole flight to be cut from two blocks and dry-assembled at the quarry. The balustrade is a folded bronzed-steel plate, 12 mm thick, that acts as both guard and structural stringer; the handrail is the same material, radiused, running unbroken from the upper landing to the floor.
Below, the floor is a large-aggregate terrazzo in warm greys, poured in situ and ground on site over eleven days. Its scale of aggregate was set against the marble veining so that the two stones argue rather than blend.
Furniture is modular and low: a sand-toned sectional in three pieces, a glass coffee table, a pair of dark leather dining chairs. Two large stone spheres, roughly a metre across, sit in the room as sculpture. Wall finishes are dark timber and a fine-textured plaster the colour of wet sand.
The jury found the stair genuinely accomplished, and the veining alignment a piece of work most projects would not attempt. It placed the entry in Honorable Mention because the remainder of the house, as submitted, is a well-executed example of a familiar luxury interior, and because the submission gave the jury little information about how the plan performs in summer, when the glazed wall is doing most of the work.
Dune Atelier is a Dubai practice of sixteen, founded in 2014 by Layla Haddad and Marcus Reiner, working on private residences and small hospitality projects in the Gulf. The office runs a stone-selection service and sends staff to quarries in Italy and Turkey for every project that uses marble in quantity, which is how it manages the vein-matching its work depends on. It has an in-house 3D visualisation team and produces its own construction imagery. Haddad has spoken publicly about the difficulty of designing for shade in a market that sells glass. Reiner runs the technical side and Haddad the client relationships and interiors. The office has completed twenty-two houses in the Emirates and keeps a materials library of around four hundred stone samples on site.