An island of villas, not a street of them
Bada Al Jubail sits inside Jubail Island, a master-planned community between Abu Dhabi and Saadiyat built across natural mangrove channels. Plots follow the shoreline rather than a grid, so almost every villa faces water and no two arrive in quite the same way.
That setting sets the brief. A villa here is read from the water and from a curving approach road, so all four elevations matter — there is no back of house to hide behind.
Two households in one plan
The ground floor is 501 sqm, and it carries two parallel sets of reception rooms. On one side of the grand entrance sit the formal living and dining rooms, each 5.70 by 7.35 metres, with their own powder room and WC. On the other sit the family living and family dining rooms and the main kitchen.
This is not duplication for its own sake. It is how a Gulf family actually uses a house: guests are received, fed and seen out through the formal sequence, while the family keeps rooms that never open to visitors.
The service block that disappears
Behind the kitchen sits a full service wing — fry kitchen, cold store, garbage room, laundry, store, and accommodation for staff and a driver, alongside a 9.00 by 5.70 metre garage.
Its value is what you never notice. Deliveries, heavy cooking and staff movement all happen on a circuit that never crosses the guest route. Get this wrong and the most expensive house still feels badly run.
Upstairs: six bedrooms and four terraces
The first floor is 456 sqm, of which 77 sqm is balcony. A master suite of 7.70 by 5.10 metres has its own dressing room and bathroom; four further bedrooms each have a closet and their own bathroom, and a second family living room of 7.95 by 5.40 metres gives the upper floor its own centre.
Four terraces wrap the plan. They are not leftovers — they shade the glazing beneath them, which is how you cut cooling load in Abu Dhabi before specifying a single pane of glass.
A roof given back to the family
The second floor is 188 sqm, and only 31 of those are enclosed. The rest is a 17.00 by 9.85 metre roof deck. Plant, water tanks and electrical rooms are grouped behind it, so machinery never sits above a bedroom.
A lift runs the full height of the house beside the main stair, which is what makes a three-storey villa usable for grandparents, luggage and everything else that ages a staircase.
Designed once, built repeatedly
The villa was developed as a prototype. That changed how it was drawn: the design was costed and value-engineered so it could be repeated across plots without losing quality, and two complete interior palettes were visualised so buyers could choose a character without the architecture being redrawn.
Materially it stays warm and restrained — travertine cladding, bronze-toned metal, warm wood veneers and large-format stone inside, under a long horizontal roof canopy that gives the house its calm proportion.