Time Frame: Suburbia between the desert and the sea

With its dutiful dog, manicured lawn, paddling pool and playhouse, Lauren Lancaster’s portrait of the Mantey house and garden from 2008 appears to capture the acme of a very suburban domesticity.

What it does not offer is any clue as to the home’s location, and that, in many ways, is entirely the point of both the picture and the carefully constructed home life it depicts.

Located in Ruwais, an oil and gas refining town 240 kilometres west of Abu Dhabi, the Mantey house is an exercise in escapism from the heavy industry and searing heat of Abu Dhabi’s Western Region.

Close to the coast but surrounded by desert, Ruwais City was first planned in the 1970s by the United States engineering giant Bechtel as a could-be-Texas, could-be-Florida, home-from-home for employees of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) which unveiled its new logo this week.

A bold example of Abu Dhabi’s early petro-urbanism, the first phase of Ruwais City included

villas like the Mantey’s, apartments, a recreation centre and separate hospitals for men and women, and was inaugurated by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan in 1982 in a ceremony that included a

bagpipe-playing marching band.

* Nick Leech