Interior design and fit-out on Bluewaters Island

Homes on the island

Bluewaters is a small man-made island off JBR, joined to the shore by a road bridge and a pedestrian link. Almost all of its housing sits in one low-rise cluster: apartments from one to four bedrooms, duplex townhouses at the base of the buildings, penthouses on the top floors, the Ain Dubai wheel on one side and the open Arabian Gulf on the other.

The buildings are recent, so a renovation here rarely begins with demolition: plumbing, wiring and air conditioning are usually sound. What owners want to change is the character. The handover finish is a neutral, carefully made shell — large-format porcelain floors, plain painted walls, a fitted kitchen, standard wardrobes — and it looks the same in every apartment on the floor.

What owners here ask for

• Decorative plaster, wall panelling and repainting instead of flat developer white
• Built-in wardrobes, hallway storage and dressing rooms with custom fronts
• New kitchen fronts and worktops, with the existing services left where they are
• Decorative and accent lighting on separate circuits, with dimming
• Floor-to-ceiling curtains, blackout blinds and glare control for west-facing rooms
• Furniture, rugs, art and tableware chosen and put in place

Because so little has to be opened up, a fit-out on Bluewaters is mostly joinery, finishes and light. Where a kitchen or bathroom really is being moved, it becomes a turnkey renovation with fresh waterproofing and re-routed services.

Texture instead of colour

Our apartment on the island has no accent colour at all. The interest comes from texture: plaster with a soft cloudy finish on the walls, heavy linen curtains from floor to ceiling, oak parquet in short staves, a travertine console, boucle and bentwood chairs, and wardrobe fronts with a linen texture and an arched grip cut into them instead of handles. In the hard daylight that bounces off the water a flat colour looks thin, while a surface with depth does not — the reasoning behind most of our interior design work here.

Working on the island

Work starts with an NOC from the building management, issued against the drawings and the contractor's documents. After that the practical limits are the ones every tower shares, and on an island they bite harder:

• Service-lift bookings for deliveries and waste removal, taken in slots agreed days ahead
• Permitted working hours, normally weekdays only, with noisy work restricted further
• One goods route in and out, with the lift car, corridors and lobby floors protected first
• Debris taken off site as it is produced: there is nowhere on the island to store it

We group deliveries so a single booked slot carries as much as possible, and agree the whole schedule with the building before the first van arrives. On an island this small the neighbours notice a badly run site the same day.

Before the first visit

The visit is free and ends with measurements and an itemised estimate. It goes faster if you have the handover drawings or a floor plan, know which management company issues the NOC, and have a rough idea of what stays and what goes. If the apartment is a second home or a holiday let — many on Bluewaters are — say so at the start: it changes the fabrics, the flooring and the way we finish and style the home for photographs on the day of handover. For a contrast, see Dubai Marina across the water, where the towers are older and the job usually starts behind the finishes.