Introducing The Summer 2026 Issue Of Bazaar Arabia Interiors | Discover Design In A New Light

Lifestyle boutique owner Georgina Trigg’s artful Jumeirah Villa feels laid-back and lived-in – an aesthetic that is both carefree and expertly honed

Finding a gem in Jumeirah when house hunting requires a combination of timing, luck and research – or as Georgina Trigg calls it, “fence peering and neighbour knocking.” But, when she found this villa in Jumeirah 3, gut instinct told her it was perfect. “I arrived an hour before the inspection, and when the agent pulled up, I made my way directly to the kitchen bench to write the deposit cheque. I don’t think I’d even gone upstairs,” she laughs.

The five-bedroom villa is now home to Georgie – Australian interior decorator and founder of lifestyle boutique Georges of Dubai – alongside her husband Michael, three children Angus, Sandy and Marigold, and a French poodle called Beluga. It was the pool that first hooked them in. Having lived by the water for every chapter of their Dubai lives (having first moved here in 2014), she believes water is not just an aesthetic preference, but a daily necessity.

The traditionally older villas found in Jumeirah come with a charm all of their own, Georgie smiles. “The quirks, the unexpected room proportions… working around these idiosyncrasies is what produces the most interesting decoration outcomes. Give me something unexpected to push against and I’ll give you a better room.”

The changes to the house were largely aesthetic. “I didn’t start with a moodboard, I started with a feeling,” the creative recalls. “I wanted the house to feel as though it had always been ours, and as though it had accumulated rather than been installed.” She describes a home and its contents as having been lovingly accrued over time, where things have “arrived independently over decades and yet somehow cohere.”

Practically, Georgie needed a home that could absorb three children, a dog, two adults with demanding careers and “look interestingly beautiful rather than exhausted by the effort.” While the floorplan didn’t need to change, there were plenty of other alterations. “What the villa emphatically didn’t work as, when we arrived, was a ‘home’. The entire interior was painted butter yellow, the kitchen was brown, the worktops black granite.” Armed with a paintbrush, a pot of Moroccan emerald green paint and an eye for detail, the upgrading began.

Beyond a lick of paint, capturing the right light was also crucial from the get-go. They took down all the lighting and added their own, and embraced the tinted windows which “create a certain quality of light, golden and burnished – it’s actually quite beautiful at certain times of day.”

Flow was also imperative; the semi-courtyard layout with a pool at the centre, created “a logic that the whole ground floor obeys. Everyone gravitates towards it without being asked. My job was to embrace that rather than fight it,” Georgie explains. And so, she kept the doors accessible, opened up the pathways criss-crossing the footprint and let the house route itself.

It’s this natural ability to see a house for both its flaws and virtues and work with them not against them that has enabled Georgie to create a home that does indeed feel loved and lived-in. Helped, of course, by an incredible potpourri of collectibles that look casually placed, yet are amassed with an expert eye.

Rooms are filled with knick-knacks found from near and far. The sourcing, Georgie says, is “deliberate and always personal,” centred around the same philosophy of buying as with her boutique. “It’s about bringing beautiful, considered things from extraordinary makers and sources to people who want to live with them.” Pieces come from antique dealers, makers, artisans and specialists “who can locate antique Syrian glass or Afghan rugs with a single conversation.” Then, there are the family trips where every journey is redirected towards the local marketplace, local ceramicist or the artisan quarter. “I’m a committed collector in the sense that what I care about is not what something costs or what it’s worth to anyone else, but the story of who made it, whose hands, how I found it and how it makes me feel,” Georgie notes. “That story is its value and I believe storytelling is what a home should do.

Lead Image Credit: Georgina Trigg, with Beluga the family poodle, in her home office

Photography by Pyong Sumaria: Styling by Emily Baxter-Priest

From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia Interiors Summer 2026 Issue