Home of two halves

Sandra Lane

• Last Updated: January 24. 2009 8:30AM UAE / January 24. 2009 4:30AM GMT

Walk into this apartment on the eighth floor of a Dubai Marina building and your eye is immediately drawn to the left, where light floods into a huge, open-plan living area. Pause at the door and you notice other details: a strongly architectural curved wall with two open-backed niches, through which you see a collection of photographs of Scottish landscapes hanging on the wall behind; an exotic-looking woven rattan chest that sits beneath a mirror with a carved wooden frame and beside a basket of artfully arranged twigs.

Everywhere you look in this apartment there is a wealth of detail and texture that adds a feeling of depth and richness to what is, in fact, a very restricted earth-toned colour palette. Whether by coincidence or design, the countless objects collected by the owners on their travels all fit perfectly into the quietly neutral scheme.

After a peripatetic life that had included spells in Kuwait, Korea, Saudi Arabia and the US, as well as their native Scotland, the owners of the apartment, Graham and Trish Cairns, arrived in Dubai in 2002, moving into a rented house in The Lakes.

Before long, they grasped the opportunity to participate in a local property market that was booming and bought the apartment off plan, intending to sell it on. However, that was not to be. “It was really a matter of timing,” says Graham. “I was just retiring when we got the keys to this place so we decided to stay put and turn the apartment into a real home.”

As an expat mother of two with a long-standing interest in design – especially textiles – Trish had gained a diploma in interior design from a British fine arts academy. Since then she has worked semi-professionally, gaining new clients by word of mouth. But the Dubai apartment has turned out to be the Big One.

“Based on the plans, I had a vision of what I wanted to do and spent a quite a lot of time working on my ideas before we got the keys,” Trish says. “Nevertheless, she adds, “the first time we walked through the door my reaction was sheer horror: so much was not as we expected.”

Top of the couple’s list of changes was ripping out and replacing the bathrooms, the kitchen and the “dreadful” ceramic flooring. Then they tackled the wall in the entrance hall. “It was right in your face when you opened the door,” Graham recalls. “It made the place feel really claustrophobic – not at all welcoming.”

Since removing the wall would have involved months of complex negotiations, they decided to work with it. They punched through two holes to break up the blank expanse and then clad it in stone, which they subsequently washed in the same shade as the painted walls – a colour remarkably similar to York stone.

The apartment is a home of two halves, open and flooded with light at one end and cosier and more intimate at the other, and Trish’s scheme has emphasised this.

The entertaining area of the apartment is a vast space, walled almost entirely in glass and opening out onto a broad balcony. Conversely, the bedrooms and family room-cum-den are cosier, softer and more intimate, picking up the darker end of the spectrum and emphasising textures and finishes.

Linking the two areas is a long and narrow hallway, which, Trish acknowledges, could have been a real challenge. Her solution: to work with its shape, not fight it. She had a wood floor laid, foreshortening the corridor by setting the boards transversely, rather than lengthways (“The builders insisted that I was doing it all wrong; they thought I was mad,” she recalls, laughing.

She added visual interest to the walls by hand-painting them in broad, vertical stripes, alternating bands of clear, glossy varnish with the matt base colour. Then she broke up the tunnel effect by positioning tall potted plants at intervals along one wall, together with a small console, on which sits a Buddha head.

The apartment feels so warm and personal it’s hard to imagine why the couple would want to leave. But that is their plan and they have put the apartment on the market.

“You see,” says Trish with a broad smile, “there’s a big house in Scotland that’s just waiting for us to come and do it up.”


The apartment is for sale via Engels & Völkers (www.engelvoelkers.com) and Quintessentially Estates (www.quintessentiallyestates.com)