Villa or Apartment in Doha?

The issue for me is that during the summer months in Doha the villa option requires a bit of thought!

We had an apartment on the 12th floor in Dubai (out of a 25 storey building) and this was fine. However there were no apartments in the area we wanted to live in Doha so we opted for a villa, that is good too.

However there are a couple of issues you should be aware of in the summer. Firstly the water storage tanks are situated on the roof. Therefore in the summer the water from both taps is very hot. This has the advantage that you can turn off your immersion heaters (and save some cash) but the disadvantage is that the water is generally much too hot for the first couple of minutes. You have to let the water flow through before it drops to just hot from too hot! Everything reverts to normal during the winter months.

Also, as the villas are generally flat roofed the bedrooms become very hot. From our experience, what we do is turn the AC unit on about half an hour before we want to go to bed (with the door shut). Then when we go to bed we turn off the AC but we turn on a big fan (this cost us about 100 Riyals and was a great investment) in the bedroom for the duration of the night. This keeps the room bearable without the need to put the AC on again (when you will wake up an hour later freezing cold).

A couple of matters to consider/overcome about villas.