#architectecture

If you like an artsy home, this one really fits the bill.

It gets lots of natural light and the architectural features are out of the ordinary.

It's a very large home and has great marble flooring.

The kitchen really has the wow factor.

Without this fabulous desk, the home office is pretty plain.

A nice shower room.

And, there's this big room for the hot tub.

Wow, this is like the hall of mirrors maze in here. But, it's very cool.

The primary bedroom is large, but it's decorated in a minimalist manner.

Behind the bed there's some storage.

And, there's also a huge closet.

The closet opens to the en-suite.

The walkway to the bedrooms.

There are a lot of bedrooms, 6 of them. This one's large and sunny. The home also has lots of glass block.

Love the sink and mirror in this bath.

Very nice bedroom. I like the furniture.

Has a cool en-suite, too.

This bedroom has a version of the same furniture. It doesn't look built-in, so I guess it will go w/the owner.

There's a gigantic basement and quite a large home gym.

If this isn't a bar, it can be used as one.

Nice patio and free-form pool.

It looks like there's also a substantial yard on the .78 acre lot.

In Dubai, the endless conveyor belt-like walking in the world’s largest shopping mall felt like sensory torture to me. The best thing about Dubai was leaving Dubai and heading instead into the desert. In contrast, the silence of the desert was instantly cleansing. A pilgrimage to the desert at weekends reinforced the spiritual dimension of deserts. The body felt different out there. Less able to hide behind the camouflage of cultured life.

I‘ve also been wondering if the city is the opposite of the desert? If the mall is the desert in a city?

We glean so much aesthetic and moral pleasure from the pictures of brand-new settlements built in desert landscapes - Saudi Arabia and parts of China come to mind - which are never inhabited, and instantly transform into ancient, ghostly ruins. There‘s the whole story of civilisation‘s ambition and idiocy in these hubristic failures, especially, as archaeology tells us, many deserts hide previous civilisations’ buried cities.

The desert is, thus, one of the ultimate encodings of deep time. Against which, human time will always lose.

I don’t know which Arab writer described Dubai as an example of ‘Gulf Futurism’ - a city built on shiny skyscrapers, petro-fuelled SUV machismo, nouveau-riche bling-baroque interior design. But, arguably, the kinds of deserts found in the Arabian Gulf are deep in the subconscious of the cities that have grown out of them: like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Manama, and Doha.