Four five star hotels stand along the Khor Al Maqta within sight of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, and ERTH is the one that arrived by conversion rather than construction. The building was the Armed Forces Officers Club Hotel, a landmark of a particular era in Abu Dhabi, and when the time came its owners […]
Sacci is the Italian kitchen here, and it gives the clearest sense of what this resort now intends. It sits within a programme the property lists at ten restaurants and bars, which is a substantial count for a hotel of 172 rooms and a sign that the kitchens are expected to feed more than the […]
Fifty square metres is the figure to hold on to here. That is roughly what a premium room runs to at Marriott Al Forsan, and it buys a balcony, a seating area set apart from the bed, a laptop workspace, a minibar and refrigerator and a bathroom sized in proportion to the rest. The outlook […]
Park Rotana stands on Al Salam Street where it meets the Eastern Ring Road, in Al Muntazah, on the side of the island where the capital does its living rather than its entertaining. Directly opposite is Khalifa Park, one of the largest public parks in Abu Dhabi, with formal gardens, a lake and a museum […]
The tower stands at 1778 Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Street, set back from one of the widest carriageways in Abu Dhabi with its own parking on the plot. It is an upright, plainly detailed building of the kind the capital put up in numbers as its exhibition trade grew, and the interest lies in what […]
Fifteen minutes separate Zayed International Airport from the door, and for the last five of them the building is impossible to miss. Capital Gate leans, visibly and steeply, at eighteen degrees, which is roughly four times the incline of the tower at Pisa, and unlike Pisa it was engineered to do so from the drawing […]
Namm Spa opens at eleven in the morning and closes at midnight, which is the first useful thing to know about Dusit Thani Abu Dhabi. Eight treatment rooms sit behind that door, along with a hammam suite and a couples’ room, and the menu runs from massage and facials through body scrubs to Ayurvedic treatments. […]
Al Maryah Island did not exist in any meaningful sense twenty years ago. It was reclaimed, planned and built as the capital’s financial district, and it now holds Abu Dhabi Global Market, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi and The Galleria. Rosewood arrived while the district around it was still going up, which is the reason the […]
Thirty four storeys, on an island that was largely water within the professional lifetime of the people now working on it. That is the shape of Four Seasons Hotel Abu Dhabi at Al Maryah Island: a single tower on Abu Dhabi Global Market Square, holding around two hundred rooms and suites across a building tall […]
The Captain’s Arms is a pub in a garden, which is not a sentence that applies to many buildings in the Gulf. It has pool tables, screens showing whatever is being played that night, and a terrace set under trees that were planted before most of the surrounding district existed. On an evening in January […]
