Al Raha Beach Resort and Spa is built low. The accommodation blocks run at a few storeys rather than the twenty or thirty that the Corniche favours, they are set in gardens, and they are arranged along the water rather than stacked back from it. The plot follows the Al Raha channel, so the buildings […]
The drive from Zayed International Airport takes about fifteen minutes and ends at the foot of the Maqta bridge, the historic entrance to Abu Dhabi island. Fairmont Bab Al Bahr means gateway of the sea, and the address is literal. The hotel stands in Rabdan on the Khor Al Maqta at the point where the […]
The private beach at Qaryat Al Beri runs for a kilometre along the Khor Al Maqta, which makes it one of the longer stretches of hotel sand anywhere on the creek and the reason a good number of guests never leave the estate. Four outdoor pools sit behind it, set far enough apart that families, […]
The Grand Canal in the name is literal. The resort was laid out around a waterway cut through the site, with ten separate buildings arranged along it and a Venetian reference carried through the property as far as the Venezia Ballroom on the events floor. It stands on Al Rawdah in the Al Maqta area, […]
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 […]
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