Discovery Gardens: durable interiors for a heavily let community

• Low-rise apartment blocks in themed clusters
• Six themed clusters according to Nakheel
• Courtyard planting between blocks

Discovery Gardens is an investment property as often as it is a home, and that changes what good interiors mean here.

Discovery Gardens is a Nakheel apartment community arranged in themed clusters around planted courtyards. For a rental brief, consider durable finishes and the time needed between tenancies.

Specifying for tenancy turnover

• Porcelain tile. It may suit a hard-wearing rental brief, but check the tile, grout, slip rating and maintenance requirements against the room and tenant use.
• Paint, not wallpaper. Wallpaper in a humid let unit is a maintenance liability. A scrubbable matt or eggshell in a neutral tone is repaintable in a day.
• Kitchens: replace doors before you replace carcasses. If the carcasses are sound and square, new doors, worktop and splashback transform the unit for a fraction of the cost.
• Standardise the sanitaryware. Fitting the same tap, the same shower and the same WC pan across your units means you hold spares and any plumber can fix it without a special order.
• Avoid anything that needs a specialist. A concealed cistern, an unusual tile format or a proprietary lighting system all delay a repair, and a delay between tenancies costs rent.

Building stock and constraints

These are low-rise blocks with shared cores, so the constraints resemble a tower in kind if not in degree: owners association approval for material changes, restrictions on the facade, defined working hours and booked service access. Established buildings also carry established problems — ageing waterproofing on courtyards and balconies, original single glazing in some blocks, and distribution boards that may not suit a modern load.

Before a full renovation in an older block here, have the electrical distribution assessed. Original circuits were sized for the appliances of their day, and a kitchen upgrade plus air conditioning plus a washing machine can exceed what the board was designed for. Rewiring is far cheaper during a renovation than after it.

The courtyard is part of the amenity

The planted courtyards between blocks are the reason this community has held its appeal. Units overlooking a mature courtyard generally let faster and hold value better than those facing a road or a car park, which is worth knowing both when buying and when deciding how much to spend on a given unit.

Courtyard planting also means irrigation, which means higher local humidity at low level and more insects and leaf fall on balconies. Ground-floor and courtyard-facing units need better insect screening and more frequent cleaning of external finishes than the equivalent unit on a road elevation.

Cost expectations

On published ranges a basic design-only service is advertised at AED 100 to 200 per square foot; construction is extra, and a one-bedroom renovation can start around AED 30,000 to 80,000. For a let unit the target should be the low end of the durable range rather than the high end of the attractive one.

Use the budget calculator to test what a given rate per square foot does to your total, and the design fees guide to decide whether a design fee is even worth paying on a unit of this size — for a straightforward rental refresh it often is not.