My Own Home: Eco-conscious family halt renovations on Dh2.7 million Sustainable City villa due to waste

Ameenah Soliman took the environment into consideration when carrying out work on her family home

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  Ameenah Soliman owns a three-bedroom villa in Dubai's Sustainable City. All photos: Chris Whiteoak / The National

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  Ms Soliman lives with her husband and two children in the house

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  The front garden

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  The patio

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  The dining and living area

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  The kitchen

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  The TV area

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  One of the bedrooms

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  A reading nook

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  The rooftop terrace

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  A nearby coffee shop

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  A children's playground

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  The Sustainable Plaza

My Own Home takes you inside a reader-owned property to ask how much they paid, why they decided to buy and what they have done with it since moving in

Ameenah Soliman, an Egyptian HR professional who grew up in the US, and her Malay-Egyptian husband, Mamdoh Bassim, moved to Sustainable City in Dubai with their two children, Musa, nine, and Maha, six, three years ago. They bought a three-bedroom corner plot for Dh2.7 million after the Covid-19 pandemic.

It’s not the first property they have bought in the UAE, where she’s lived for 12 years. Mr Bassim grew up in Al Ain and previously owned an apartment in JBR. But Ms Soliman was determined to make it the last home they lived in here, as they’d fallen in love with this eco-conscious community, which aligns with their family values.

The National takes a look around.

Please tell us about your home.

We have a front garden, which is nice because our kitchen window looks out on to it. So when you come in, you come in from the front, where we have our trampoline and patio. Then there’s a small entrance and a huge living-dining room area, then a bathroom and a family room connected to the kitchen, where we spend about 90 per cent of our lives.

The whole bottom floor has floor-to-ceiling windows. Then on the second floor, you have three bedrooms. On the third floor, there’s a liveable roof. Last year, we retiled it, got furniture and installed a projector screen so at night we can watch films upstairs, which is my kids’ favourite activity.

How much did you buy the house for?

We got our place for Dh2.7 million. When we first came there was a house with a similar set-up two clusters away for Dh2.5 million. We had put an offer on, and we lost the offer to our now-friends. We didn't think we were going to find anything else, because a corner three-bedroom is very rare, there are only about eight in the community, and three of them were being sold. This house was Dh3 million originally, but we negotiated it down to Dh2.7 million. Now I think they're going for about Dh4.5 million.

At the time we weren’t sure if it was a good investment. Everything was crashing. It was a scary time.

Why did you decide to buy the property?

My family has the mentality that you buy where you live and my husband's very aligned on that. We felt that if we got into the rental cycle, it would be hard to break it, and prices were quite good at the time, so we just kind of took a leap of faith. We met a few people in the community and we liked it, so we thought worst-case scenario, if we hated it, we could always sell it.

Why did you choose this neighbourhood?

Our youngest child was about to enter school, so we didn't want to do two school runs with pickups and drop-offs. We wanted a community that has an on-site school. Then, when we came and we saw the villas and the community, there were a lot more pros than just the school.

The Sustainable City is Dubai's most eco-friendly neighbourhood. Chris Whiteoak / The National

We’re always thinking, can we recycle? Can we compost? We do try to minimise our footprint as much as we can, and I wanted my kids to do that as well. Because my husband and I work from home, we felt it would be really good if we lived somewhere where we had space and didn't need to drive.

Also, in The Sustainable City, the model is not just sustainable from an environmental perspective. When you buy here, there are no service charges, because it's also economically sustainable. We have a plaza full of restaurants and we have apartments that are for rent. The revenue that they generate from that is supposed to be used to pay for everything within the community.

What renovations have you done?

We renovated the garden and we've changed the flooring all over the house. On the main floor, we did these large porcelain tiles that look like marble. We extended the kitchen cabinet to the top and wrapped the doors in white.

We did the powder room and went for micro-cementing, which was new to me, and I thought it was going to be so much better for the environment because you're not breaking down the tiles, you're just sanding them down. I graduated with a degree in civil and environmental engineering, so I don't want to do anything that's going to be too bad for the environment.

The downstairs bathroom uses micro-cement on the floors and walls. Chris Whiteoak / The National

But when I did the micro-cementing, I realised it’s really bad, because they have to sand it all down and take out all the gloss. I was worried about the guy doing it ingesting all these particles because he wasn’t wearing a mask. In theory, I love the end product, because it looks so sleek and so smooth, but I don’t know if it’s the best overall.

That's why I didn't renovate the bathrooms upstairs because it's just so much waste. When you see how much you're breaking and how much you're throwing, it’s like lorry loads. At the end of the day, where is this going and what was the main purpose behind it? You had a functional cabinet or a working sink.

I'm very happy with what I've done, but I am stopping and taking a look at more sustainable options. Now I'm only doing things that are broken.

What facilities do you have?

We have two pools – one is for more serious swimmers and the other is a family pool. My kids will take lessons, and they can go and concentrate, then come and meet us at the family pool and play with their friends.

The school is in the community and their friends are everywhere, so breaks are super easy because we know all our neighbours and they play together. I feel like community schools are so good for children when they're younger. My daughter will be riding her bike into school and she'll see her French teacher from grade one who just moved next door. There is this sense of community and it gives them a really strong feeling of ownership and belonging.

We get our haircuts and nails done in the community. We have our own butcher. We have a tonne of restaurants that we use, and a lot of the kids’ activities are within the community. The kids get piano and drum classes and they’ll go on their bikes. They have an insane amount of independence, which is really nice. We rarely have to leave.

How long do you plan to stay in this property?

I wouldn't leave unless I'm leaving the country. I'm sure as my children get older and become teenagers, they might not use all the facilities, but I've invested so much into the house, and it's the exact design that I want, and it's big enough for our family, and it's far enough from the noise and there’s less pollution.

As for the UAE, when my kids attend university, I want to live in the same country as them. They can dorm and go wherever they want, but if they go to the US, I don't want to be 14-and-a-half hours away. I want to be close enough for weekends and the holidays, so I’d move too.