Microcement is a pigmented cement and polymer coating, one to three millimetres thick, laid over a floor or wall that is already there and closed with a sealer. In Dubai it is mostly a renovation finish over tile, marble or screed in occupied villas and apartments, because it adds almost no height and needs no demolition. It is not a screed, not a levelling layer and not waterproofing. What sits underneath it decides how it performs.
What a one-to-three-millimetre coating can and cannot do
Microcement is a pigmented cement and polymer coating laid in thin passes over a surface that is already in place, then closed with a sealer. The whole build measures one to three millimetres, and that figure settles most of the argument. It is a coating rather than a screed, a levelling compound, a tanking layer or a structural element. It will not flatten a floor, it will not dry one out, and it carries none of the load it stands on. Microcement goes down on floors and up walls, into bathrooms and kitchens, over pool tanks and onto external terraces, and in every one of those places it is a surface treatment sitting on work that somebody else did first.
We are equally direct about the other side of it. Microcement is not a natural finish and it is not vapour-open: the sealer that makes the surface hard-wearing also shuts it, and that is the trade the material asks you to accept. Where a Dubai brief turns out to be about a breathing mineral wall rather than a floor that takes traffic, microcement is the wrong family, and the materials range sets out which one is right. Confusion inside the smooth, seamless group is constant, and the three-way comparison separates polished plaster, tadelakt and microcement before a schedule commits to the wrong one.
What microcement does that the mineral plasters cannot is take floor traffic and cover an existing floor without demolition. Cemher's Microdur Plus, Micropool and Microrock are the systems our crews lay. The scale reference sits outside the UAE, at the King Fahad Cultural Centre in Riyadh, where we installed 9,000 square metres of Microdur Plus, and at the LA7 Wellness Beach Club in Egypt. Both are technique references from other markets rather than Dubai projects, and we would rather label them plainly than leave them to be read as something they are not.
In Dubai the floor is usually already down
Most microcement work in this emirate is refurbishment rather than new build. The floor exists already — polished marble in a villa entrance, large-format porcelain running through a living room, an apartment tiled a decade ago — and the client wants it gone from view without it going out in a skip. Breaking out a marble floor in a house somebody lives in means weeks of demolition, dust, noise and rubble, and then a finished floor level that has to be rebuilt to meet every door and threshold again. At one to three millimetres the level barely moves, so doors, skirtings, kitchen plinths and fitted wardrobes stay where the joiner left them.
That advantage moves the risk somewhere awkward. On a new build the specifier controls the screed, its curing, its joints and its flatness. On a villa renovation nobody controls any of it: the floor was laid by another contractor to an unknown standard, over a slab nobody can produce drawings for, and it has since lived through years of leaks, alterations and small settlements. Every one of those unknowns sits under the finish and none of them shows in a colour sample. The survey is therefore not a formality to be got through before the interesting part of the job. It is the part that decides how the job ends.
So the first conversation on a Dubai enquiry is rarely about colour. It is about what is on the floor now, how it was fixed, whether it sounds hollow, where it has cracked, what sits in the rooms above and below, and what has leaked. We survey before we price, as our Dubai coverage sets out. Al Sa'fat, Dubai Municipality's green building system, reaches work inside existing buildings as well as new ones, and the finishes side of it is covered separately. For the Cemher systems the evidence we hold is VOC emission and content testing by Applus Laboratories, which is test data rather than a compliance certificate; the register sits on our credentials page.
The substrate survey: sound, dry and still
Sound comes first. A tiled floor is surveyed by tapping across it, because a debonded tile reads hollow long before it feels loose underfoot. Anything drumming, cracked or lifting is taken out and made good, and the repair is brought back to the same plane as the tiles around it. This is not a point to negotiate against a price: a tile moving today is still moving under two millimetres of coating, and the coating will report it as a crack along the tile edge inside the first season. The same test applies to hollow render on a wall, and to any earlier making-good that never properly bonded to what it was patching.
Then dry. A sealed finish laid over a substrate that is holding moisture will hand that moisture back to you, usually as discolouration or as a blister at the weakest point in the plane. In Dubai villas the sources are predictable: a slow supply leak under a bathroom, a planter standing against an internal wall, condensate from an air-conditioning run, a screed covered before it had finished drying. We take moisture readings before anything is primed, and we would rather push a date than coat over a problem we can already measure. Where the source is still live, the plumbing is the first fix and the finish waits behind it in the programme.
Third, movement, and here the material is plain about its limits. Microcement is a thin, hard, continuous plane. A joint that is still opening beneath it will reappear in it, usually within the first year. Every structural and perimeter joint in the background therefore has to be repeated in the finish, and its position agreed on a drawing before anyone primes, rather than improvised around the furniture on the day. Flatness behaves the same way: a coating this thin reproduces the plane it is laid on, so a dished floor stays dished and a shower area falling the wrong way goes on falling the wrong way. Correcting levels is a layer underneath, and a separate line in programme and price.
Going over tile, and the grid that can telegraph
The classic microcement failure over tile is the grid. A tiled floor is not one material. It is stiff tiles separated by softer, more absorbent grout lines, and the two behave differently under a thin coating: different suction as the base coat pulls in, slightly different movement afterwards. If nothing is done about that, the joint pattern can telegraph through as a faint square grid — invisible in a photograph and perfectly visible in raking light down a long corridor at seven in the morning. It does not always happen. It happens often enough to belong in the conversation before the contract rather than after it.
What reduces the risk is unglamorous, and almost all of it happens before the first pigmented coat. Glazed porcelain and polished marble are dense and give a primer nothing to hold, so the face is mechanically abraded to open a key. Joints are filled flush, leaving neither a step nor a void under the coating. A mesh-reinforced base coat then spans the change in stiffness across each joint instead of sitting straight on it. After that it is a question of building enough thickness, and of not thinning the system to save a coat on a floor where the whole point of the exercise is that there is nothing to hide behind.
Sometimes the honest answer is that the tile comes up. Large-format tiles with wide, deep joints; tiles bedded on a screed that is itself cracking; floors reading hollow across whole areas; several tile types meeting at changes of level — in those cases the preparation costs more than the demolition would and still carries more risk. We will say so. A microcement floor that has to be explained to the client every time the sun is low is not a saving, and surveying before pricing exists precisely so that this is found out while it is still a decision rather than a defect.
Wet rooms and pools: the coating is not the waterproofing
Microcement suits bathrooms, wet rooms, kitchens, pool tanks and terraces, and the sentence that has to sit immediately beside that one is this: it is a finish, not a waterproofing system. The tanking membrane still belongs beneath the coating, correctly detailed at the drain flange, carried up as an upstand and lapped where the wall meets the floor. Falls to the drain are formed in the substrate, not corrected inside three millimetres of finish. Micropool is the system rated for immersion. None of this is exotic — it is the discipline any wet room needs, and it does not quietly become optional because the visible surface has no joints in it.
On a Dubai renovation that creates one specific decision. The bathroom being refurbished already has a membrane under its tiles: unknown age, unknown specification, unknown condition, installed by somebody nobody can now ask. Our position is that an unknown membrane does not get covered. The wet room comes back to slab, is re-tanked and tested, and the microcement goes over work we can stand behind. That is more programme and more cost than coating over the existing tiles, and it is the difference between a finish and a liability. Where the budget cannot carry it, the wet rooms stay tiled and the microcement stays in the dry rooms, which is a decision, not a failure.
Two details decide how a wet room in this material actually behaves. The first is the fall: because the coating follows the plane it is given, the gradient towards the outlet has to be right in the screed before anyone opens a bag. The second is the junction between the floor and the wall, where a continuous surface is at its strongest and a badly formed corner is at its most obvious. If the brief wants a mineral, vapour-open surface on the wet-room walls rather than a sealed coating, that belongs to lime plaster and Microtadelakt, and what such a surface does and does not resist is set out in is tadelakt waterproof.
Thresholds, joints and how a repair will read in year five
A renovation ends where the new coating meets something that is staying. In a Dubai villa that is usually a marble stair nosing, a threshold into a room being left alone, an existing skirting, a stone reveal or the underside of fitted joinery. Each of those junctions needs a decision before the first coat goes down: whether the coating stops short, runs under a bead, dies into a shadow gap, or is trimmed against a metal profile. Left to whoever is on site that morning, they get resolved four different ways in four rooms, and the eye reads that inconsistency long before it reads the colour anybody spent a month choosing.
Movement joints deserve the same treatment, because a seamless floor has no pattern to hide them in. On a tiled floor a joint could be lost in a grout line; on a continuous plane it becomes a visible line across the room, and where that line falls is a design decision rather than a site one. Mark the perimeter, the structural joints and every change of substrate on the floor plan, agree the profile and its colour with the same care as the finish itself, and place the joints where they read as intentional — at a door line, at a change of level, at the edge of an open-plan zone.
The last edge case is time. Microcement is repaired locally: the damaged area is cut back, recoated by hand and resealed, which is a real advantage over a discontinued tile that nobody can match. It is still a hand-applied finish, so a patch is visible to a degree worth seeing now rather than discovering later. Ask for the batch and colour reference to be recorded against the approved panel, and keep that panel on site rather than in a skip at handover. In a house where a washing machine will eventually be dragged across a hall, that record is what makes a repair look like a repair instead of a different floor.
Dust, drying time and a house somebody lives in
Because nothing is demolished, a microcement renovation produces no rubble, and clients hear that as no mess. It is not no mess. The coating is sanded between passes, and sanding a floor inside an occupied house produces fine dust that travels through every door left open. The work runs behind sealed containment with extraction at the machine, adjacent finished areas are protected, and so is the route from the front door to the room. In an occupied villa we would rather set out the containment and the working hours in writing at the start than discover the family's expectations halfway through the second week.
The programme is governed by drying and curing rather than by the handover date. Coats follow one another with drying time between them, the surface is sanded, sealer coats go on, and then there is a curing period before the floor takes heavy traffic or a wet room takes water. Those intervals come from the manufacturer's data sheet for the specific system, and they shift with temperature and humidity: a closed-up villa in August with the air conditioning off is not the same site as a conditioned one and will not behave to the same timetable. We will not compress a cure to meet a date. A floor rushed at the sealer stage is the floor marked in week one.
Sequencing matters as much as duration. Microcement is a late trade: wet trades finished, joinery fixed, the room effectively complete. The most common way a good floor is damaged is not application at all — it is a following trade walking a scaffold tower across it two days after sealing. Protection after sealing is a real line in the programme, it belongs to somebody by name, and on a villa handover with several packages running at once it is worth writing that name down while everyone is still in the room and willing to own it.
What to put on the mock-up, and how to look at it
For a Dubai renovation the mock-up cannot be a board in a workshop. It has to be laid on the actual substrate, in the actual room, over the actual tile, because a panel made on clean plywood tells you about a colour and nothing whatever about that floor. Choose the area with the worst light in the room rather than the best: a corner nobody looks at proves nothing about a plane running towards a glass wall. If the house cannot spare an area, that is a problem worth solving in the first week of the job rather than at completion, when the only remaining options are expensive ones.
Put the difficult things into the panel deliberately. Include at least one grout line, so you can see whether the joint grid reads through. Include a threshold or door line, so the termination is agreed while it is still cheap to change. Include an internal corner, and in a wet room include the drain and a piece of the fall towards it. Then look at the panel twice: once in raking morning light down the length of the room, and once under the room's own lighting at night. Sheen changes how microcement reads far more than pigment does, and the sealer on the panel has to be the sealer specified.
Two questions close the conversation. Ask for the system's slip data before a wet floor is committed to it, and ask to see a local repair made on the panel rather than trusting a description of one. Then ask who is holding the trowel: roughly 200 applicators work directly for us on our own sponsorship, and the same company sells the system and lays it, so the survey, the primer, the coats and the sealer never sit in two different contracts when a question arises. Send the room list, the drawings and photographs of the existing floors through the enquiry page; the clauses and data sheets are on specify. WhatsApp works too: +971 50 136 0506.