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By the time the thermometer in Dubai reads 45°C in late June and the Empty Quarter’s afternoon air begins to vibrate with refracted light, two responses are available to a building: deny the heat or design around it. The properties worth writing about for World Travel Magazine this summer are the ones that do neither — they design with the heat, treating it as a brief rather than a problem. What they share, across Dubai, the Liwa, and Marrakech, is that none of their solutions are new. Desert architecture is the oldest climate-responsive design on earth. The contemporary version, where it works, is an act of remembering.
Bulgari Resort Dubai
It is tempting, on Jumeira Bay Island — the seahorse-shaped landfill Dubai produced for the purpose — to look first at what Antonio Citterio and Patricia Viel chose against. ACPV Architects, who have designed every Bulgari property since the Milan original, refused the vertical instinct the Emirate imposes on every other beachfront and built low. The 158,000 square metres of resort and residence step down toward the sea in two- and three-storey volumes that, in plan, owe more to a southern Italian seaside village than to anything Dubai had produced before. That horizontal discipline is the climate decision. A low building self-shades; a tall one cannot.
Bulgari Resort Dubai
The façade does the second half of the work. The two main hotel buildings are wrapped in coral-form brise-soleils — white lacquered steel sunscreens whose porosity functions, in the afternoon, exactly as mashrabiya did in the old Gulf merchant houses: fragmenting the sun before it reaches the glass, allowing air to move through. The Carrara Arabescato cladding the external walls completes the equation; the marble is dense enough to lag the thermal cycle, so the surfaces still cool to the touch at the end of a long day. Walk from the 300-metre bridge into the lobby and the body registers the procession — outside glare, dappled shadow under the coral screens, then the deep cool of marble and a long sightline to water. You do not feel rescued from the heat. You feel handed through it.
What this design cannot solve is the question of the island itself. The desert Dubai built around Citterio’s building is a manufactured idea. The architecture is sincere. The site is not.
Qasr Al Sarab, Liwa
Two hours south of Abu Dhabi, where the saline plain finally gives up and the dunes of the Rub’ al Khali begin, the typology shifts from villa to fortress. Qasr Al Sarab — qasr, the fort — was designed by the South African firm Northpoint with interiors by Hirsch Bedner Associates, working under guidance from the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage. The brief was explicit: build a desert citadel the Empty Quarter would not reject. The result, opened in 2009, is a building whose colour is the precise ochre of the dune it sits below, whose walls are thick enough to function as thermal mass, and whose crenellated parapets do the thermal work of self-shading the upper storeys through most of the day.
Qasr Al Sarab, Liwa
The cleverest move is orientation. The 154 rooms and 51 villas face inward toward shaded courts and pools, or outward across the dune sea, but almost never west. Afternoon sun is absorbed by blank walls. By dusk, when the air outside cools faster than the masonry, the walls release the day’s heat slowly inward — the same principle by which a Rajasthani haveli or a Yemeni tower house has always worked. Open a villa door at four in the afternoon and the dune is a wall of light forty metres from your terrace; the architecture has framed it for you, made it the view, made you want to walk into it rather than retreat from it. That is the entire argument of the building.
Royal Mansour, Marrakech
If the Liwa fortress is one ancestor of contemporary desert luxury, the Marrakech riad is the other. The Royal Mansour, commissioned by King Mohammed VI and designed by OBMI with roughly two thousand Moroccan maâlems — master craftsmen drawn from Marrakech, Essaouira, Fès, and Meknès — is built as a medina within the medina: 53 private riads arrayed around shaded alleys, each organised around its own central courtyard. The plan is the climate strategy. The courtyard pulls the building’s coolest night air down into a stone-lined well; the fountain at its centre evaporates and cools further; the thick tadelakt walls hold the result through the afternoon. Zellige underfoot stays cooler than skin. Moucharabieh — carved wooden screens — filter every window. None of this was invented for the hotel. All of it is several centuries old.
Royal Mansour, Marrakech
The honest tension is the touchscreen-controlled retractable glass that now covers each courtyard at the first hint of rain or wrong temperature, and the underground service tunnels through which staff move so guests never see them. Both are sensible. Both also concede that the riad alone cannot meet modern expectations of climate and discretion. The Royal Mansour’s intelligence is that it admits this in the engineering and conceals it in the craft.
The desert taught architecture everything it knows about luxury — thickness, shade, water, procession, the dignity of arriving slowly — and these three buildings, in different registers, are paying attention. ◼
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© This article was first published online in June 2026 – World Travel Magazine.
