Abu Dhabi Private Villa

The Abu Dhabi villa is a classical house — arched loggia, tiled roof, cream render — with a wholly contemporary entertainment landscape laid out beside it. A pool, a lawn, a covered bar pavilion and a pergola walk, all of which AL SHOLA ALMODEA designed, supplied and installed, built in a different architectural language from the house they serve.

The two halves are lit differently. The house keeps to concealed cove and recessed downlights behind its classical detailing, and shows no fitting at all. The landscape carries everything visible: uplit palms, low-level fittings along the paths, linear runs set into the paving, and a pavilion with four layers working over one counter.

The pavilion is a flat cantilevered roof on stone piers, with a timber soffit and a stone counter running its length. A concealed strip follows the roof edge and draws the line where the soffit meets the sky. Recessed downlights sit in the timber. A row of open-weave pendants hangs over the counter, their shades letting light through while shielding the lamp.

The fourth layer sits below eye level. A strip is concealed under the counter overhang, washing down the stone face. It puts no light on the working surface; what it lights is the stone, and that is what reads from across the lawn.

A covered walk runs from the pavilion back towards the house. Its frames are decorative metalwork in a pierced, branching pattern, and a vertical linear fitting is set into the inside face of each upright.

Because the fitting sits inside the frame and not on its face, no source is visible from inside the walk. What you see is the metalwork lit from its own edge, repeated down the length of the run, with the paving picking up the spill.

Along the garden path the lighting is in the floor. Linear fittings are recessed flush between paving sections at regular intervals, so the route reads as a rhythm of bars, not a line of poles.

Bollards handle the wider lawn edges, and narrow-beam uplights pick out individual palms. Nothing in this part of the garden is mounted above head height.

Inside the house the approach reverses. The corridor is lit almost entirely by a cove concealed in a recessed ceiling tray, throwing light onto the plaster and letting it come back down. A few recessed downlights sit in the flat of the ceiling.

There is no decorative fitting in the frame and no visible source. Where the landscape is a collection of lit objects, the interior is a single lit surface.

Almost none of this scheme was installed by an electrician working alone. On a job like this the fittings arrive inside somebody else’s component, and the sequence follows that trade rather than the electrical programme.

Take the pergola. The vertical fittings sit inside the metal frames, which makes the channel part of the fabrication drawing and not a site decision. The recess is cut and finished in the workshop, the cable route runs inside the hollow section, and the frames arrive able to take a fitting. Get the section wrong at drawing stage and the correction is a workshop job, not a site one.

The counter strip is the same problem in stone. A concealed strip under a stone overhang needs a rebate in the underside of the slab, and stone is cut once. Rebate depth, setback from the front edge and cable exit all have to be on the stone shop drawing before the slab is machined.

The recessed paving strips are groundworks. The fittings sit flush between pavers, so positions are set out with the paving, ducting goes in before the sub-base, and the drainage falls have to work around them. Retro-fitting a floor fitting into laid paving means lifting and relaying.

Timber soffits are more forgiving. Downlights and the roof-edge strip are cut into the boarding and can be adjusted while the ceiling is open. The pavilion is the one part of this job where a change on site is cheap.

Indoors the cove is a plastering operation. The tray is formed by the plasterer, its trough dimension agreed before he starts, and the fitting goes in once the plaster is done.