Five kinds of work, and we do most of it ourselves

Villas, apartments, offices, clinics and retail units. Strip-out and rebuild, or finishes on a new shell, or a single trade where that is all you need.

Six of our twelve trades sit in this group: tile mason, plasterer, gypsum installer, painter, carpenter and general helper. They are our employees, which is the difference between a programme and a negotiation. A fit-out is five trades that have to arrive in the right order; when each of them works for a different company, the order is something you find out about after it has gone wrong.

What it changes for you: one programme instead of five, one supervisor answerable for sequencing, and no gap between the plasterer finishing and the painter arriving because the painter's firm has another job that week.

Trades in this group

• Tile Mason
• Plasterer
• Gypsum Installer
• Painter
• Carpenter
• General Helper

Trades in this group

• Block Mason
• Steel Fixer
• Carpenter
• General Helper

Blockwork, steel fixing, concrete, extensions, and structural alteration to existing buildings. New build where it sits inside our Dubai Municipality classification, which we will tell you at the first conversation rather than after you have paid for drawings. Ours is Dubai Municipality building contractor classification G+4.

Structural alteration to an existing villa or unit is the commonest version of this work and the one most often started without approval. Removing a wall in a Dubai property is a submission, not a decision, and doing it without one surfaces at the point of sale.

Where we hold the main contract on a building, articles 821 to 824 of the UAE Civil Code make us and the engineer jointly liable to you for ten years from handover for structural safety. By statute, regardless of fault, and it cannot be contracted out of.

Electrical installation and fittings, plumbing and sanitary, air conditioning, ventilation and air filtration. Installation and maintenance. Four of our twelve trades sit here and all four are our own.

MEP is where fit-out projects in this city go wrong, and they go wrong for a predictable reason. In a Dubai tower the air conditioning is a landlord system, the electrical load is a landlord allowance, and both come with a building management approval that the interior contractor discovers he needs three weeks after starting. We establish the building's constraints and the owner's NOC requirements at the scope stage, before you commit to a layout the riser cannot serve.

On villas the equivalent question is DEWA load and whether the existing distribution board takes what you are adding. It is a cheap check at scope stage and an expensive one after the ceilings are closed.

Trades in this group

• Electrician
• Plumber
• HVAC Technician
• MEP Technician

Installation on new build, replacement on existing buildings, and remedial work to facades that no longer meet current requirements.

Facade work in Dubai runs alongside Civil Defence rather than after it. Materials, fixings and cavity treatment are a fire and life safety matter before they are an appearance matter, and the approval route differs from the rest of the building. We will tell you at survey stage what the existing system is, what replacing it would take, and what can be repaired instead.

Which authority approves your project depends on where the property sits, and establishing that is the first thing to do because it changes the timeline and sometimes the design. Mainland plots go to Dubai Municipality. The TECOM areas, including d3, Internet City, Media City and Studio City, go to DDA. Nakheel communities such as Palm Jumeirah, Jumeirah Islands and Jumeirah Park, and the port areas including JAFZA, go to Trakhees.

Running alongside, and separately: Dubai Civil Defence for fire and life safety on any commercial premises, DEWA for a power and water NOC, and a no-objection letter from the community developer or the building owner, which is the item that most often stops a fit-out everybody thought was approved.

We make the submissions, and you get a written calendar at the start with each item, the authority it goes to, who is responsible for it, and a realistic duration. Not a promise of a date, because approval timelines are not ours to promise. A map of what is coming, so that a four-week wait is something you planned for rather than something you discover.