The staircase in this Abu Dhabi home, photographed by Oculis Project, used to sit pressed against the glass, wrapped in black marble, barely touched by daylight. It was the first thing Alamira Noor Bani Hashim, founder and creative director of ANBH Interiors, decided to undo. Pulled away from the window and given room to breathe, the stair became something closer to sculpture than structure, visible from nearly every corner of the house.

The client’s request was simple. “More than anything, she wanted the home to feel like a peaceful escape,” Bani Hashim says. “We kept the palette intentionally tight and neutral, but introduced a much richer language through texture, material and subtle shifts in tone.”

That language begins at the entrance, where double-height ceilings meet Italian travertine wrapped floor to wall, “so it feels almost carved from one material.” The stone continues into the dining room, framing doorways before softening into limewash, letting sculptural pendants take over the conversation. Those pendants, it turns out, took the longest of anything to resolve. “Every object needed to feel incredibly considered,” she explains, “enough presence to hold its own, while still feeling completely at ease.”

Further in, the house grows warmer and more casual, until the family dining room arrives wrapped entirely in wood, intimate and cosy, before the kitchen closes the sequence with a bolder marble countertop set against the quiet of limewash walls.

None of it was built to feel new. “I’ve never loved that feeling of walking into a home and everything feels brand new and untouched,” Bani Hashim admits. Vintage finds sit deliberately beside bespoke pieces, patina layered in on purpose, so the house feels as though it has already been lived in and loved.

Asked what best captures the whole project, she returns to that staircase. “It became lighter, more open and sculptural,” she says, “seeing the potential in what was already there and giving it an entirely new presence.”