The blank canvas

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An outdoor lifestyle was integral to the vision. (Oqyana World First)

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The villas are placed to maximise beach frontage. (Oqyana World First)

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Density is a characteristic of the archipelago. (Oqyana World First)

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Density is a characteristic of the archipelago. (Oqyana World First)

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Designing an island is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for any designer, and it doesn't get much better than that island being part of The World. Michele Howe talks to Ron Mitchell, the visionary behind Oqyana World First.

When it comes to dream projects, designing an island has to be pretty high up on the list. Unfortunately, for most, that project will remain just a dream but for the chosen few working on The World in Dubai, the dream has just become a reality.

Ron Mitchell, director of US-based Global Design Collaborative, is one of the lucky ones. He is overseeing the design of Oqyana World First, a group of 22 islands that make up the Australasian continent and the New Zealand islands of The World, which is under development by Nakheel Properties.

Located four kilometres from the coastline of Dubai and occupying a total area of 1.87 million m², Oqyana - derived from the Arabic word for oceanic - is pitched as an exclusive lifestyle destination and community.

The development, which will be powered by its own 50,000 m² utility island, will have villas and apartments as well as a retail hub, three hotels, and restaurants and cafes. Infrastructure works are due to start on Oqyana towards the end of this year with completion for the project slated for 2011.

All design projects are a challenge, but where do you start with an uninhabited, and until recently non-existent, group of islands? The primary consideration was to establish an identity for the project, Mitchell tells Commercial Outdoor Design.

"The first questions we were asking were what is going to make Oqyana special? What kind of a destination resort is it?," he recalls. "It's really more of an urban destination. It's very close to Dubai.

There are a lot of buildings on these islands. It isn't Bali or the Maldives where you have three or four beautiful villas and a sandy beach. There is a lot of density here. We decided very early on that Oqyana is not going to be a sleepy resort, it is about island lifestyle. Island lifestyle next to one of the most exciting cities in the world."

While the project had much scope for creativity, it wasn't a completely blank canvas, however. The investors behind Oqyana, The Investment Dar and EFAD Holdings, had a strong vision as to what they wanted to see, says Mitchell. "Oqyana set the vision in so far as they said we don't want a resort like any other. We want you to create an Oqyana style," he says.

What this meant was finding a way to combine the relaxed pace of island life with the sophistication of a modern city. "One of the decisions we made early on was that we didn't want to be thematic," says Mitchell. "We wanted to create the Oqyana style that was particular to this group of islands, [something] that you wouldn't see anywhere else in the world."

"We decided we wanted to do contemporary, we wanted it to be of the 21st century. We wanted to do a lifestyle development for very wealthy and sophisticated individuals without doing clichés. There is a sophisticated elegance in the whole product, but it's relaxed. It is all about the water, about living on an island."

In contrast to the current trend for iconic developments sweeping the Gulf, the team pledged to create something with more lasting appeal, taking the lifestyle as its indicator. "Dubai has so much of what we call satellite architecture," says Mitchell.

"If you are looking down from out of space, it looks like a palm tree or it spells something special and I'm not opposed to any of that, but we decided not to be iconic. We weren't about building monumentality or icons. We were about building a lifestyle looking on the sea."

This vision was translated into a creation of what Mitchell terms ‘signature moments', celebration of the island lifestyle. And the outdoor space was pivotal to achieving this. "It's all about moments of delight. The delight of just sitting on a shaded structure reading or walking with your children or your family on the beach," says Mitchell.

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