Where We Spend Our Days
We ask a great deal of luxury resorts and wellness destinations — but rarely enough of the places where we actually spend our days.
The average office worker spends upwards of eight hours inside a building. That building will shape their mood, their concentration, their sense of calm or anxiety, their health over years and decades. Yet for much of the twentieth century, the workplace was not designed around people.
The research is overwhelmingly supportive, with no contradicting findings for office‑based window views of green spaces. Studies beginning with Roger Ulrich’s landmark 1984 work demonstrated that even a view of trees measurably reduces stress. Kaplan and Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory confirmed what we intuitively sense: exposure to natural environments replenishes directed attention and reduces mental fatigue. Green views from the workplace should not be a luxury. Green views are a health and productivity intervention.
The World's Healthiest Workplaces
Some of the world’s most celebrated workplaces have understood this for years — Apple’s campus in Cupertino, Amazon’s Spheres in Seattle, The Edge in Amsterdam. WELL-certified towers across London, New York and Melbourne have made the connection between green environments and worker performance a cornerstone of their design.
We asked a simple question: why not here? Why not in the UAE?
The answer is straightforward. We can.
The Courtyard Tree Garden
The heart of this development is the courtyard tree garden .
Tall, slender trees with light canopies allow filtered daylight to reach the floor, casting the space in the dappled quality of light that only a canopy can produce. Beneath them, an understorey of shade-tolerant species creates a deeper, cooler green — that particular quality of colour that registers in the body as calm and relief. Pathways meander amongst the trees. Movable chairs invite workers to choose their own relationship to the space, in company or in solitude.
Every office floor looks directly into the courtyard. The green view is not reserved for the corner office — it belongs to everyone. In a climate where the outdoors is a refuge only in cooler months, the courtyard becomes the year-round garden that the street cannot always be: visible, restorative, present at the edge of every worker’s day.
Research Papers on The Healthy Workplace
Koga, Y., Okamoto, T., Majima, R., Jarrin, F., Kojima, Y., Ohki, C., Kawano, A., & Takagi, N. (2023). Green view factor and satisfaction with window views in urban offices. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2600(11).
Hadavi, S. (2025). Research Note: The types of plants in the window view matter in predicting neighborhood satisfaction and different aspects of wellbeing. Landscape and Urban Planning, 263, 105451.
Du, Y., Li, N., Zhou, L., A, Y., Jiang, Y., & He, Y. (2022). Impact of natural window views on perceptions of indoor environmental quality: An overground experimental study. Sustainable Cities and Society, 86, 104133.
Ko, W. H., Schiavon, S., Zhang, H., Graham, L. T., Brager, G., Mauss, I., & Lin, Y. W. (2020). The impact of a view from a window on thermal comfort, emotion, and cognitive performance. Building and Environment, 175, 106779.
Elsadek, M., Liu, B., & Xie, J. (2020). Window view and relaxation: Viewing green space from a high-rise estate improves urban dwellers’ wellbeing. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 55, 126846.
Zhou, W., Yang, B., Ling, L., & Zhang, H. (2025). Association between greenness at workplaces and outpatient visits and health expenditures for mental disorders. Environmental Research, 285, 122440.
Wells, N. M., Rahai, R., & Phalen, K. B. (2025). Everyday and nearby natural environments. Environmental Psychology and Human Well-Being, 245–280.