What makes One Avenue beautiful to come home to

One Avenue is a single thirteen-storey building on Fithuroanu Magu in Hulhumalé, and its best feature is the view it was placed for: the yacht marina, directly below. Developed by DAMAS Real Estate Pvt. Ltd., it holds 95 homes, and the homes Binga has let were listed on the strength of it: the water and the sunset come into the living room.

Built to face the marina

The developer's description is short on superlatives and long on specifics, which is a good sign. It calls the building a set of apartments that "overlooks the scenic yacht marina", a short walk from the Hulhumalé ferry terminal and Central Park. Seen through the homes Binga has handled, that sentence becomes something concrete: a furnished three-bedroom whose living room and main bedroom both look over the marina towards the sunset, and a 3+1 described with unobstructed sunset and marina views through floor-to-ceiling windows and bi-fold balcony doors.

Bi-fold doors are worth dwelling on. When they fold back, the wall between the living room and the balcony more or less disappears, and the room becomes half indoors. On the sunset side of a marina building, at the end of the day, that is most of the beauty of the place.

A mix of homes, each with its own outlook

The catalogue sets out the building floor plan by floor plan, with the view each type is planned around:

• Thirteen one-bedroom homes of about 657 square feet, facing the garden.
• Twenty-six two-bedroom homes, from about 846 to 1,085 square feet, facing the city.
• Fifty-two three-bedroom homes, from about 1,083 to 2,091 square feet, facing the sea or the city.
• Four penthouses of about 3,470 to 3,490 square feet, facing the sea or the city, each with a private plunge pool, a wrap-around garden and walk-in closets in every bedroom.

That range matters for how the building feels. The largest three-bedrooms are nearly twice the size of the smallest, so a household choosing a three-bedroom here is choosing between genuinely different homes, not variations on one plan.

The details that make a flat work

Most units have two balconies, a private one and a service balcony, and that pairing does a lot of quiet work. The private balcony stays a place to sit. Laundry and the drying rack go on the service side, out of the view. Bedrooms are en-suite, with a separate guest bathroom, and there is storage space, a modern kitchen, and a living and dining area.

In the 3+1 homes Binga has seen, the plus is a real room: a maid's or storage room with its own full bathroom, which makes four bathrooms in all.

A garden in the middle of the building

On the second floor there is a private garden and a children's playground. Placing green space inside the building rather than at street level is a thoughtful choice: children play off the street, and residents have somewhere green of their own. The garden-facing one-bedrooms look onto it.

The building behind the view

What makes the view easy to enjoy is the building's organisation. There are four residential lifts, and the shops have a commercial lift of their own. There is a concierge and a 24-hour reception, CCTV and round-the-clock manned security, access control, and a fire prevention system. Parking for cars and motorbikes takes up two dedicated floors, and a shopping mall and retail spaces sit within the building.

The catalogue does not list a pool or a gym, and a tenant should not expect one. One Avenue's version of luxury is the marina, the light, and a building run by people at a desk.