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The definitive source for luxury
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Hotels & Holidays

Ten Cones, Thirty Galleries: Gehry’s Last Museum Opens in December

5 Mins read
September 1, 2026
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi seen from the landscaped promenade, its stacked cones rising behind

Nine of them are clad in steel mesh. The tenth is onyx and glass.

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The Museum That Cools Itself With Five Steel Wings

6 Mins read
September 1, 2026
The steel falcon-wing towers of Zayed National Museum rising above a fountain court

Foster + Partners built a chimney and put a national museum underneath it.

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Via Riyadh Has Seven Cinemas and None of Them Is a Cinema

5 Mins read
August 28, 2026
The Wall Street cinema hall at Via Riyadh, with long upholstered banquettes facing the screen

One is a train carriage. One is a majlis. One has beds.

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The Best Table in Riyadh Faces a Ruin

5 Mins read
August 28, 2026
Diners at a table at Bujairi Terrace in Diriyah

Fifteen thousand square metres of restaurants, built from the same mud as the UNESCO site they look at.

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Riyadh: The Guide

6 Mins read
August 28, 2026
The mudbrick towers and walls of the At-Turaif district in Diriyah at golden hour

A capital that spent twenty years as a business trip and about four becoming a destination.

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AlUla Has a Season, and It Is Only Four Months Long

5 Mins read
August 24, 2026
A single hot-air balloon drifting between sandstone formations in AlUla at sunrise

Five festivals between late October and mid-February. Outside them, a very hot canyon.

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Three Ways to Sleep in Ashar Valley — and One Inside a World Heritage Site

6 Mins read
August 24, 2026
A long swimming pool running between sandstone rock faces at Our Habitas AlUla

A tented resort, a canyon village and a hotel built into a 1907 railway station.

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Dar Tantora: Thirty Houses, Seventeen Hundred Candles, No Light Switch

6 Mins read
August 24, 2026
The pool at Dar Tantora with daybeds and lanterns, below the sandstone cliffs of AlUla

A twelfth-century town was falling down. Somebody rebuilt thirty of its houses with the original mud.

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AlUla: The Guide

6 Mins read
August 24, 2026
Aerial view of the rock-cut Nabataean tombs of Hegra standing in open desert

Two hundred thousand years of settlement, eight hotels, and a season that runs from October to February.

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ABOUT LUXTIONARY

Luxtionary is your ultimate guide to the world of luxury, celebrating exceptional quality, craftsmanship, and timeless elegance. Our blog explores high-end fashion, beauty, jewelry, travel, home decor, automobiles, and more. With engaging articles and behind-the-scenes glimpses, we bring you the latest trends and insights from renowned designers and tastemakers.

Featured Posts

Where to Stay in Doha

October 10, 2026

The Museum of Islamic Art and the Doha Museum Circuit

October 10, 2026

Doha: The Guide

October 10, 2026

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The five steel wings rising out of Zayed National The five steel wings rising out of Zayed National Museum look like sculpture and are in fact plumbing.

They are thermal chimneys. Air heats at their tips, negative pressure builds on the sheltered side of each aerofoil, and the resulting draw pulls hot air out of the atrium below while cool air arrives from ducts buried underground. The building breathes through them. That is the whole idea, and it is why the museum looks the way it does.

Norman Foster put it plainly when it opened: the building is an expression of sustainability, with five aerodynamic wings that are an integral part of the environmental system, acting as thermal chimneys and drawing cool air through the public spaces.

The metaphor is falconry. The mechanism is a wind tower running backwards — the traditional Gulf barjeel catches breeze at height and pushes it down into a room; this inverts that.

It opened on 3 December 2025, a project spanning roughly fifteen years, and for most of that time the most conspicuous unfinished building on Saadiyat. Foster + Partners won the commission in a competition in 2007.

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Jeddah was a walled city until 1947. The wall had Jeddah was a walled city until 1947.

The wall had been rebuilt in 1525 against a Portuguese threat, repaired through the nineteenth century, and still stood three or four metres high in 1940. Then it came down, and Al-Balad has been recovering ever since.

The old town is built from coral stone, which is a strange material to build a city from and an extremely good one for this climate. It is porous, which means it breathes. It is light, which means you can go up five or six storeys without a heavy frame. And it was, crucially, free and adjacent.

The wooden lattice screens do two jobs at once: they let air move through a room and light into it, while making the interior invisible from the street.

Naseef House was begun in 1872 and finished by 1881 — seven floors of coral stone in the middle of the old town. King Abdulaziz stayed here in 1925.

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Most watch houses begin with the movement and buil Most watch houses begin with the movement and build the watch around it. Cartier drew the shape and went looking for something to put inside it.

A hundred years later, Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult put it second in Switzerland — behind Rolex, ahead of everyone who was making their own movements the whole time.

#Cartier #Tank #WatchHistory #luxury #watches
AlUla took 286,000 visitors across the whole desti AlUla took 286,000 visitors across the whole destination in 2024 — a number worth holding on to, because it is smaller than almost anyone assumes.

Hegra is the anchor: the first site in Saudi Arabia inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, in 2008. Qasr al-Farid was never finished, which is why the method is still legible — the carvers worked downward from the top.

The oasis is not scenery, it is agriculture: 2.3 million date palms producing more than ninety thousand tonnes of dates a year, two hundred thousand citrus trees, figs, olives, barley and wheat, all on underground spring water.

And Maraya — a cuboid a hundred metres square and twenty-six metres high, holder of the Guinness World Record for the largest mirrored building on earth, at 9,740 square metres of mirrored surface, achieved on 26 December 2019. TIME named AlUla one of the World's Greatest Places in 2024.

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Every luxury hotel in Saudi Arabia has a spa. Almo Every luxury hotel in Saudi Arabia has a spa. Almost all of them have three or five treatment rooms, a hammam, a menu, and a therapist who is very good at their job.

None of that is wellness in the sense the industry means it, and the distinction is not snobbery. It is the difference between an amenity you book on Tuesday afternoon and a reason to fly somewhere.

A programmed wellness property does something structurally different. It assesses you, it prescribes a course of several days, it controls the food, and it measures something at the end.

Until May 2026 Saudi Arabia did not have one. It now has two, and the category is about four months old.

Miraval The Red Sea opened on Shura Island on 15 May 2026: a hundred and eighty rooms, suites and villas, adults only, all inclusive, with a three-thousand-square-metre spa.

Six Senses Southern Dunes was designed as a wellness property from the plan up rather than fitted with a spa afterwards, and remains the best-integrated one — building, location and programme designed together.

In AlUla the setting does more work than the equipment, which is a reasonable division of labour. Banyan Tree's spa facades are compacted sand in horizontal coloured bands echoing the rock strata behind them.

Full piece → link in bio
Must de Cartier was gold-plated silver. The first Must de Cartier was gold-plated silver. The first Must Tank cost $500 in 1977.

Before it, Cartier's Paris workshop produced a few thousand pieces a year — the output of a jeweller making something when a client asked.

After it, more than 160,000 a year.

Everything people love and dislike about Cartier today was decided by that one product.

#Cartier #MustDeCartier #WatchHistory #luxury
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About Us

Luxtionary is your ultimate guide to the world of luxury, celebrating exceptional quality, craftsmanship, and timeless elegance. Our blog explores high-end fashion, beauty, jewelry, travel, home decor, automobiles, and more. With engaging articles and behind-the-scenes glimpses, we bring you the latest trends and insights from renowned designers and tastemakers.