Residents Move Into Dubai's Tallest Luxury Tower Above Water Canal

Al Habtoor Tower opened in September 2026, and its 1,740 luxury apartments make it one of the world’s tallest residential buildings, perched directly above the Dubai Water Canal.

The 350-meter tower rises over Al Habtoor City, its 85 residential floors stacked above three basement levels and a ground floor. Apartments range from one-bedroom units spanning 78 to 141 square meters to three-bedroom homes occupying 162 to 229 square meters. The most exclusive offerings, the Ultra Residences and Sky Villas, occupy the top six floors. Twenty-four high-speed elevators, capable of traveling at 7 meters per second, connect residents to the building’s terraced gardens, pool decks, wellness spa, fitness gym, padel and tennis courts, children’s playground, library, event rooms, and on-site restaurants. From their windows, residents look out over the Burj Khalifa, Business Bay, the Arabian Gulf, and Sheikh Zayed Road.

Getting to that point required solving a problem most residents will never see.

The canal location placed the tower’s below-grade structures under sustained groundwater pressure, a condition that threatened the long-term durability of the concrete foundation. MAK Engineering, serving as project engineering consultants, and the China Railway 18th Bureau Group, the general contractor, confronted this early. Rather than demolishing the existing basement, they adopted a top-down construction approach, allowing above-ground and below-grade work to proceed simultaneously. The method depended on 100-meter deep Barrette foundations, rectangular excavated piles engineered to resist large vertical and horizontal loads.

The numbers behind that foundation work are striking. The team completed roughly six kilometers of Barrettes, which are 90-meter deep shear walls, along with one kilometer of circular piles, all within eight months. Above ground, construction moved at a six-day floor cycle.

To protect the completed foundation from groundwater, project planners specified PENETRON ADMIX, a crystalline waterproofing admixture integrated directly into the concrete of the raft foundation and retaining walls. Sam Annous, Managing Director of Penetron Saudi Arabia, explained the reasoning plainly: “Due to the depth of the below-grade structures and the resulting groundwater pressure, a reliable concrete waterproofing solution was required to protect the massive tower’s new below-grade structures.”

The crystalline approach works from within the concrete itself, providing protection that is, in principle, as durable as the structure it serves. For a building of this height and weight, the integrity of that foundation is not an engineering footnote. It is the condition on which everything above it stands.

What remains to be seen is how the tower’s engineering choices perform across decades of use, and whether the solutions developed here shape how Dubai’s next generation of canal-adjacent towers is built.