Middle East Business

A 234 home beachfront scheme at Jumeirah 1 moves into delivery, with the enabling works let and a completion window already fixed

By Staff Writer  |  25 August 2026

Meraas and BGRE have taken Solaya out of design and on to site. Swissboring Overseas Piling Corp. Ltd holds the shoring, excavation, piling and dewatering, with that package due to finish between September and November 2026.

Meraas, part of Dubai Holding Real Estate, and BGRE, formerly Brookfield Properties, have broken ground on Solaya, a beachfront residential scheme at Jumeirah 1 in Dubai. The two companies announced the start of works on 24 August 2026. The scheme has been in the market since its launch in October 2025; what has changed is that groundworks are now running across the site.

The numbers the developers have published are these: 234 residences across nine buildings on a 40 acre site, in two, three, four and five bedroom formats, with penthouses, garden houses and duplexes. Architects Foster and Partners lead the design, with interiors by 1508 London.

Under the Meraas brand, Solaya brings together rarity of location, design excellence and long-term value, reinforcing Dubai's position as a global destination for luxury living.

Khalid Al Malik, Chief Executive Officer of Dubai Holding Real Estate

The package that is actually let, and what it covers

Swissboring Overseas Piling Corp. Ltd has been appointed to the enabling works. The published scope is shoring, excavation, piling and dewatering, and the developers have put a completion window on it of September to November 2026. That is a two to three month band on a package that has only just started, which is unusually specific for an announcement of this kind.

For anyone pricing or administering work of this type, the four named operations sit together for a reason. Shoring and dewatering are the two that most often generate claims on a coastal site, because both depend on ground and groundwater conditions that nobody can fully characterise before the excavation is open. A beachfront plot at Jumeirah 1 will have a high water table, and the dewatering duty is a function of what the excavation actually meets rather than what the site investigation predicted.

A completion window stated as a range, rather than a date, is worth reading twice. It tells you the parties have accepted that the finish depends on conditions that are not yet known, and it says nothing about who carries that risk.

What a stated window does and does not settle

Nothing in the announcement says how the enabling works contract allocates ground risk, whether the September to November band is a contractual completion obligation or a programme expectation, or what the main works procurement looks like behind it. Those are the questions that decide who pays if the dewatering runs longer than allowed for, and they are not matters a launch statement is meant to answer.

What the announcement does establish is a sequence. An enabling works contractor is on site under a defined scope with a stated end window, and the main construction package follows behind it. Where the two overlap, and how the handover of a completed excavation is certified, is where the first arguments on a scheme of this shape usually start.

As the project moves into its next phase, our focus is on disciplined execution and bringing forward an exceptional residential community in one of Dubai's most established coastal neighbourhoods.

Rob Devereux, Chief Executive Officer of BGRE

The wider position

Dubai Holding Real Estate brings together Nakheel, Meraas and Dubai Properties, and states that its communities house close to 1.6 million residents. Solaya is delivered under the Meraas brand and is a joint undertaking with BGRE, which manages more than 330 million square feet of property internationally on behalf of Brookfield.

The scheme sits in an established part of the city rather than on reclaimed land, which removes one whole category of programme risk that has attached to Dubai waterfront work in the past. Whether the enabling works meet their stated window will be the first public test of the programme, and it will be answered before the end of the year.