ARCHITECTURE · DUBAI
Reading time: 6 minGive every apartment in a tower its own private pool, then stack them so they step and stagger up the elevation, and the building starts to look like falling water. That is the idea behind Foster + Partners‘ Regent Residences Dubai: a project where the luxury and the architecture are, for once, the same thing.
Most towers hide their plumbing. Regent Residences Dubai makes it the whole point.
Designed by Foster + Partners for Sankari Properties, under the Regent hospitality brand, the project comprises two 180-metre towers rising at Marasi Marina in Dubai’s Business Bay, with completion projected for the end of 2027. On paper, it is another luxury twin-tower development in a district that has no shortage of them. In practice, it has one genuinely good design idea, executed with the rigour you would expect of the world’s most exacting large practice, and that idea is worth explaining properly.
The idea: a private pool on every floor, made visible
Here is the move that makes the building.
Regent Residences offers one apartment per floor: sixty interlocking homes across the two towers, each occupying an entire level, each oriented for uninterrupted views and cross-ventilation. That much is standard ultra-prime practice: fewer, larger residences, maximum privacy, maximum outlook.
What is not standard is that every apartment has its own private pool, and Foster has arranged those pools so that they stagger and step across the elevation, cantilevered out at shifting positions floor to floor. The result is a façade that appears to cascade like water down the buildings, a kinetic visual rhythm built entirely from a feature that most towers would tuck away out of sight.
This is the cleverness worth naming. In most luxury developments, the amenity and the architecture are separate conversations; the pool is a selling point on the brochure, the façade is a skin drawn by an architect. At Regent Residences, they made the same decision. The private pool is both what the buyer is paying for and what gives the building its identity. The luxury is the form; the form is the luxury. That collapse of the two is a genuinely elegant piece of thinking, and it is why this reads as a Foster building rather than a developer’s tower with a famous name attached.
The sky bridge, and the pool in the air
The gesture everyone will photograph sits at the very top.
At the highest level, an ultra-penthouse bridges the two towers, and the bridge contains a sky pool, an enclosed swimming pool suspended between the buildings as part of a single sprawling residence. It is the exclamation mark: a private pool that spans the gap 180 metres above the marina, turning the two towers into a linked pair rather than two separate objects.
Structurally and symbolically, it does the same job. It gives the composition a silhouette; the twin verticals joined by a horizontal at the crown, which distinguishes Regent from every free-standing tower around it, and it caps the “pool on every floor” logic with the most extravagant pool of all. The idea that runs up the façade, one home at a time, resolves at the top in a single dramatic span.
It is showmanship, unmistakably. But it is coherent showmanship; the flourish grows out of the building’s own logic rather than being bolted on for effect.
Foster + Partners’ quiet Business Bay district
Here is the context the original coverage under-sells, and it is the most interesting fact about the project.
Regent Residences does not stand alone. It joins Vela and Vela Viento, two further residential skyscrapers also designed by Foster + Partners for Sankari Properties on the same stretch of Dubai waterfront. Which means Foster is not delivering a single tower here. It is, in effect, shaping an entire luxury enclave at Marasi Bay, building after building, for a single developer.
That is a significant thing, and it changes how you should read Regent. This is not a one-off commission dropped into an existing skyline; it is one piece of a coordinated Foster-designed waterfront — a rare instance, in a city that grew by letting a thousand towers compete, of a single practice being given the room to compose a coherent district. The shared design language across Vela, Vela Viento and Regent is the point. Dubai is, quietly, getting a Foster + Partners neighbourhood.
For a practice whose Middle East work already includes some of the region’s most disciplined buildings, Marasi Bay is becoming a sustained statement rather than a single gesture.
The base: a podium that meets the marina
Towers this tall live or die on how they touch the ground, and Regent’s answer is a landscaped podium designed to knit into the marina promenade rather than turn its back on it.
The podium carries the full amenity programme, greenery and water features, private dining, a substantial gym, a series of indoor and outdoor pools, and retail units integrated along its edge where it meets the public waterfront. That last detail matters: rather than presenting a blank wall to the promenade, the development provides active frontage where the city passes by, so the base contributes to the marina walk rather than privatising it.
It is the correct instinct, and a Foster instinct; the recognition that a luxury tower still has a civic obligation at street level, and that the most exclusive parts of a building can sit happily above a base that gives something back to the public realm.
Views, orientation and the Burj
The residential logic is straightforward and well-judged. With one home per floor, each apartment is oriented to capture uninterrupted vistas: sunrise and sunset, the marina below, and direct sightlines to the Burj Khalifa, through expansive glazing. Splitting the accommodation into two slimmer towers rather than one fat one is what makes this possible: it increases the perimeter, so more of every home meets the outside, and it improves natural light and cross-ventilation in a climate where both are hard-won.
None of this is showy, and all of it is the quiet competence that separates a serious tower from a marketing render.
Frequently asked questions
What is Regent Residences Dubai? A twin-tower luxury residential development at Marasi Marina in Business Bay, Dubai; two 180-metre towers by Foster + Partners for Sankari Properties, under the Regent hospitality brand, with sixty apartments (one per floor) and completion projected for late 2027.
Who designed it? Foster + Partners, in collaboration with Sankari Properties and the Regent brand (part of IHG Hotels & Resorts).
What is the cascading façade? Every apartment has its own private pool, and the pools are staggered floor to floor so they appear to cascade down the elevation like falling water, turning the amenity into the building’s defining architectural feature.
What is the sky pool? An enclosed swimming pool inside an ultra-penthouse that bridges the two towers at their highest level, suspended roughly 180 metres above the marina.
How does it relate to Vela and Vela Viento? Vela and Vela Viento are two further residential towers Foster + Partners is designing for Sankari Properties on the same Dubai waterfront, making Regent Residences part of a coordinated, Foster-designed luxury enclave at Marasi Bay rather than a stand-alone project.
When will it complete? Completion is projected for the end of 2027.
Final thoughts
Business Bay is a district built on competition; a forest of towers, each shouting a little louder than the last. Regent Residences Dubai is quieter than its neighbours, and better for it, because its drama comes from a single coherent idea rather than a pile of features.
Give every home a pool. Stack the pools so they fall like water down the face of the building. Bridge the two towers at the top with one more pool in the sky. It is luxury and architecture saying the same thing at the same time, and it is one piece of a larger Foster + Partners composition quietly taking shape along the Marasi waterfront — the same studio currently reshaping Miami’s skyline with 619 Brickell and London’s retail landscape with RH’s Mayfair gallery.
In a city that rarely lets a single hand shape more than one building at a time, that may turn out to be the more important story.
Leave a Reply