Dubai, UAE — 2023

RESIDENTIAL

1,840 m² · LEED Platinum

Typology

Private Residence

Location

Al Barari, Dubai UAE

Floor Area

1,840 m²

Completion

Q3 2023

Certification

LEED Platinum

Carbon Reduction

74%

The Lumina Residence is a study in restraint. Commissioned by a family who wanted a home that would "outlast our grandchildren," the brief demanded permanence, ecological integrity, and a spatial language that would feel neither dated nor fashionable — simply, enduringly right.

The clients approached Arch Studio with a clear mandate: build a home that performs at net-zero, uses only materials with verified low-carbon credentials, and creates spaces that feel as generous and alive in fifty years as they do today. The 1,840m² plot in the Al Barari district of Dubai presented both opportunity and constraint.

The building is organised around a central courtyard — a device as old as architecture itself, and as relevant as ever in a hot climate. The courtyard draws cool air through the house via a stack-effect ventilation system, reducing mechanical cooling demand by an estimated 38%.

The structural system is cross-laminated timber — a choice that sequesters approximately 1 tonne of CO₂ per cubic metre of
material, and that gives the interior spaces a warmth and acoustic quality that concrete and steel cannot match. The CLT
panels were prefabricated in Austria and assembled on-site in eleven days.

Fig. 01

The central courtyard, looking south. External shading fins reduce solar gain by 62%.

The interior palette was developed in close collaboration with the clients over eighteen months of material research. The
guiding principle was that every surface should have a story — a traceable origin, a material logic, a reason to be exactly what
it is rather than a substitute for something else.

Floors are honed Omani limestone, quarried 400km from the site. Walls are a mix of polished micro-cement in warm sand
tones and exposed CLT panels, left unfinished to reveal the grain and texture of the timber. Joinery is solid walnut, hand-
finished by a workshop in Stuttgart.

The Lumina Residence was completed in Q3 2023 and achieved LEED Platinum certification — the first private residence in the
Al Barari district to do so. Post-occupancy monitoring over the first twelve months confirmed that the building performs within
4% of its modelled energy targets, and produces a 12% annual energy surplus fed back to the local grid.

PROJECT PHOTOGRAPHY

12 images

Next Project

Tokyo, Japan · Commercial · 2026