The Journal

Dubai’s rental market is often treated as one investment field, but in practice it divides into two quite different models. A short-term apartment in Downtown Dubai, let to winter visitors, does not work in the same way as a one-year tenancy in Dubai Marina or a villa leased to a family in Arabian Ranches. The asset may be the same, but the rules, costs, income pattern and daily demands are not.

Roman Vnoukov’s career has taken shape in the more private rooms of architecture and design, including residences, boutiques, restaurants and branded interiors made for clients with a clear sense of what they want to project. His public record does not follow the usual architectural path of competitions, civic buildings and museum retrospectives. It belongs instead to a more client-led world, where design has to carry identity with discipline, from a Manhattan jewellery house to a branded residential tower in Dubai.

South Asia has never submitted to a single story. Its histories are plural, its artistic traditions layered across centuries of exchange, rupture, and reinvention — and any exhibition that attempts to compress that complexity into a coherent whole risks losing precisely what makes it compelling.

For over a decade, Dubai has been the name on every property investor's radar. Its skyline, its lifestyle and its phenomenal transaction volumes have transformed the emirate into one of the world's most recognised real estate markets, and the numbers are almost impossible to argue with. In 2025, Dubai recorded more than 270,000 real estate transactions totalling AED 917 billion ($250 billion USD), a 20% jump in both volume and value from the year before and the market’s fifth consecutive record-breaking year.

Buying off-plan requires confidence in what is yet to be built, and Dubai gives that confidence a defined structure. The city’s off-plan market is built around a clear legal framework: approved developers, registered projects, escrow accounts, provisional registration and title transfer once the project is complete. For buyers, the appeal is easy to understand. Off-plan property can offer access to newly planned communities, staged payment plans and early entry into prime developments before completion.