I went back to a house I finished about ten years ago. The same family. They wanted to repurpose a couple of rooms now that the kids had grown up. I walked in and the house still looked incredible. Not in a preserved, untouched way. In a way that made sense, like it had always been there and always would be.
There were a few spots along the skirting where water had come through during the floods. The timber had swelled slightly. I noticed because it’s my job. Most people would never see it. The client will sort it eventually. But the rest of the house, the floors, the materials throughout, looked exactly as they should. Timeless, because we used the right things.
That’s the argument for natural, quality materials in one sentence. Ten years later, the house still looks right.
And this is not a case against cost saving / low maintenance materials. I use those too. High-traffic areas, utility spaces, rooms where performance matters more than anything else. They have their place and I put them there. I’m not precious about being a purist.
But there are spaces where a natural material does something no engineered alternative can. And the question is never really natural versus faux. It’s knowing which call to make in which space, and making it deliberately rather than defaulting to whatever’s easiest to justify to a client.
The simple version: save on the surfaces no one lives with, spend on the ones they do. The surfaces someone touches every day, sees every morning, walks across barefoot, leans against while the coffee brews. Those are worth doing properly.
The argument I make for natural materials is mostly about what happens over time.
Take brass. An electroplated finish and a solid brass fitting look almost identical in a showroom. The cost difference between them is real, significant enough that it’s one of the harder conversations I have with clients. But when the electroplated finish scratches, and it will scratch, the coating comes away and you can’t fix it. You replace or recoat the whole piece. Solid brass patinas over time. It shifts in colour and warmth. If you want it back to its original finish, you polish it. The material gives you options. The other one just gets damaged.
Marble works the same way. I had a bathtub surround get cracked during installation once. Natural marble, expensive, and pulling it out wasn’t the answer. The marble team came in, opened the crack slightly, filled it with marble dust and resin epoxy, polished it back. You couldn’t tell. It looked intentional, like a vein the stone had always had.
A crack in porcelain or engineered stone: you’re pulling it out. Large format tiles are even worse, the cost and logistics of replacing a single cracked tile are significant. With natural marble, you call the right people.
Wood follows the same logic. A scratch in a timber floor, a specialist can fix it on-site or swap a single plank. Small job. The full floor isn’t at risk. And the question I hear from almost every client before I specify natural timber in Dubai is whether it’s even appropriate for this climate. The answer is yes, if it’s done correctly. I have floors that are fifteen years old and still look perfect.
One of those clients had their entire bedroom flooded during a storm. Ten centimetres of standing water across the whole floor. The water was pumped out, the floor was dried quickly, and not a single board buckled. Not one. Good material, installed properly, maintained well. That’s all it takes.
There’s another version of this argument that’s less about repair and more about beauty.
I walked through a cathedral once where the marble steps had actual dents in them. Worn down by centuries of footfall. Not damage, not neglect. The material doing exactly what it was always going to do. It was the most beautiful thing in the room.
There’s a worn patch on the edge of a kitchen counter I designed years ago. Right where someone leans every morning while the coffee brews, same spot, every morning, for fifteen years. That counter isn’t failing. It’s telling a story.
These are not failures of design. They are the design working exactly as it should, absorbing life instead of resisting it.
I work in Dubai. I see some of the most expensive villas in the world, and it tends to go one of two ways.
The first: everything neutral, everything interchangeable. All bathrooms in the same tile, same fixtures, same palette. The bedrooms could be in any house. Strip the furniture out and there’s nothing left, no decision that tells you anything about who lives there. Keep the furniture in and it’s often not much better. A collection from an Italian brand, picked because it looks right in a showroom, sitting in rooms that were never actually designed around it.
This is what designing for resale produces. The assumption that whoever buys it next will hate your choices, so why commit to anything specific, anything personal. The result is a home designed for an imaginary future buyer instead of the person living in it now. Neutral on purpose. Belonging to no one.
The second is the opposite. One takes the right location, but then skimps on the finishing quality. Cheap labour, no attention to detail, nothing built to last. You can spend an extraordinary amount of money in this city and still end up with nothing, if the decisions were never about quality.
Different problems, same root. The money went in. The thinking didn’t. And in the second case, there was likely no designer involved at all. A contractor, a developer, a catalogue of finishes picked for margin rather than merit.
Part of it is mindset. Dubai was a transient place for a long time. People came, lived well, moved on. The home was never really the home, it was a stint, a posting, a nice place to be before somewhere else. That shaped what people asked for: finishes that photograph well and appeal to whoever buys it next.
That’s changing. The people I work with are building homes they intend to stay in. Not five years. Twenty, thirty. Some of them are talking about retiring here. That changes the whole question. When you’re here for the long run, you stop designing for resale and start designing for yourself. The materials matter differently. The quality of execution matters differently. And the argument for doing it properly, for choosing the real thing over the convenient thing, becomes obvious.
Getting clients to think that way is most of the work.
And I’ll be honest: I’ve done it too. Projects where I let the cost conversation win. Specified the faux marble because the client pushed back, pulled back on the timber to save budget, didn’t fight for the real brass because we were already stretched. Some of those decisions I’d push harder on now. The compromises you make at the material stage are the ones you notice every time you walk back into that house.
But the direction is clear. UAE is settling. People are staying. The homes being built here should start reflecting that, and being at the front of that shift is what I want Studio SuCo to stand for.
I went to visit a client a few months after she moved in. One of those check-in visits, just to see how the house was settling.
I noticed the stain before she said anything. A shadow on the hardwood floor near the dining table, the kind you only see when the light catches it at a certain angle. Red wine. Most of it had come out. Not all of it.
I asked if she wanted me to send someone to sort it.
She looked at it for a moment and said no. Then she told me about the dinner party. Her closest friends, first time in the new house, someone mid-laugh knocked a glass and it went across the floor. They tried to clean it. Left what was left.
She wasn’t bothered. She was glad it was there. That was the moment she understood, she said, why I’d pushed so hard for that particular wood. Not because it was the most expensive option. Because it was the one that would share the story.
You design for the stain. Not because you plan for failure but because you plan for life.
