Hassan El-Tayeb

Hassan El-Tayeb founded Qasr Horizon Developments in 1998 with a single mid-rise residential plot and a conviction, unusual at the time, that a developer should keep and operate what it builds. Almost thirty years later the firm still holds a majority of its completed stock, a structural decision that has shaped everything about how it designs.

El-Tayeb is an engineer by training and remains closely involved in specification. He is known within the industry for an obsessive interest in the unglamorous layers of a building: service risers, facade access, chiller redundancy, the width of a corridor once a wheelchair and a delivery trolley must pass each other. His argument is commercial rather than sentimental. A building the owner intends to hold for forty years is designed differently from one intended to be sold at handover, and the difference shows up in service charges long before it shows up in the photographs.

The Qasr Horizon portfolio now spans residential, light industrial and a growing mixed-use pipeline across Dubai and the northern Emirates. The most discussed project remains a mid-density district in which he insisted on ground-floor retail depth sufficient for independent operators, arguing that a street with only bank branches and phone shops is a failed street.

He has been an outspoken participant in debates about construction payment terms and subcontractor treatment, positions that have not always endeared him to peers. Outside the business he funds a scholarship programme for engineering students from the northern Emirates and keeps, by reputation, an extremely tidy site office. He has three grown children and has said publicly that none of them are guaranteed a job in the company.