Private Mansion

This Private Mansion is a 56,000 sq ft end-user residence in Abu Dhabi, developed as a highly personalized interior design project centered on atmosphere, experience, and spatial drama. Conceived as a home of exceptional scale, the project goes beyond luxury in a conventional sense, instead shaping an environment where every level is designed to evoke wonder, comfort, and ceremony.

Transforming the residence into “a luxurious and harmonious palace” that blends elegance and comfort while creating unforgettable guest experiences through the idea of the skylight. Design around sensorial experiences and the act of looking upward, tying the interiors to light, verticality, and memorable moments.

The core challenge was to design an interior experience worthy of the home’s extraordinary scale while ensuring it still felt personal, cohesive, and emotionally engaging for daily life. With formal entertaining spaces, family areas, private suites, wellness functions, and supporting villas all forming part of the broader brief, the project required more than aesthetic consistency — it needed a strong conceptual spine capable of unifying a very large and varied program. 

The client ambition was rooted in memorable, multisensory experiences, asking how architecture could integrate tasting, smelling, hearing, light, and vertical discovery into one residence. That meant the interiors had to perform on two levels at once: as refined living environments for the end user, and as immersive spaces for hosting, ritual, and spectacle.

Our approach was to treat this mansion as an experiential interior landscape rather than simply a sequence of rooms. The concept design explored two major spatial ideas — Skyward and Underlight — both organized around a dramatic triple-height volume. “Skyward” emphasizes ascent through an elegant stair journey toward the terrace, while “Underlight” begins from below, where a chandelier and skylight become the defining visual event. Together, these ideas reveal the project’s larger ambition: to make movement through the residence feel cinematic, vertical, and emotionally charged. 

The wider program reinforces this ambition. A substantial main villa with formal majlis spaces, family living, show kitchen, offices, prayer room, multiple bedroom suites, a roof-level ballroom and main dining space, wellness studio, spa rooms, and observation deck, alongside guest villas and an external majlis. 

What makes the project especially distinctive is the way hospitality-style experiences were woven into the home. The concept identifies a series of “experience zones,” including an artificial rain experience, tea and herb hub, coffee and chocolate hub, pizza and pasta workshop, observation deck, experience shower, and snow room/snow sky concepts. These elements position the residence as a private retreat built around ritual, entertainment, and sensorial richness. 

Materially and visually, the concept language is highly sculptural. The interiors are defined by monumental volumes, reflective surfaces, crafted feature walls, layered lighting, dramatic chandeliers, curved forms, and a recurring emphasis on craftsmanship and bespoke artistic detailing. The result is an interior identity that feels expressive, luxurious, and unmistakably custom-made for the client.

This Private Mansion emerged as a large-scale private residence with a strong experiential identity — one that balances palace-like grandeur with curated lifestyle moments across its living, entertaining, and wellness spaces. Rather than relying on scale alone, the project derives its impact from the way light, procession, materials, and sensory experience are orchestrated together.

For an end-user client, that makes the project especially meaningful: it is not simply a prestigious property, but a highly individualized home designed around presence, ritual, and unforgettable moments.