Eight properties where the building is the reason to go.
Since 2023, Saudi Arabia has been handing extraordinary sites to architects with the budget to answer them properly: an uninhabited island in the Al Wajh Lagoon, a mountain in the Hejaz, a railway station the Ottomans finished in 1907. Kengo Kuma took one. Foster + Partners took two. What follows are the eight where the architecture, not the address, is the reason to book — and where, in most cases, the most interesting decision the architect made was about restraint.
Shebara, Sheybarah Island
Thirty-eight of Shebara’s seventy-three keys are spheres of polished stainless steel cantilevered over the water. Killa Design’s stated intent is that they reflect the sea and the sky until they dissolve into the horizon, which is an ambitious thing to write in a brief and a stranger thing actually to build.
The solution was to stop building on site altogether. Every villa was constructed, fitted out and commissioned offshore, then floated to the island as a near-complete structure — partly to spare the reef, partly because there is no reasonable way to assemble a mirrored orb in a lagoon. The entrances borrow their lines from superyachts. The resort runs on its own solar farm.
Source: Killa Design / Red Sea Global
The St. Regis Red Sea Resort, Ummahat
Kuma’s ninety villas — forty-seven on the beach, forty-three over the water — are the opposite argument. Nothing here reflects anything. The roofs curve low in imitation of the dunes and are clad in cedar shingles. The walls are clay plaster. The structural timber is spruce, chosen for how it behaves in salt air, and most of it was prefabricated so that concrete could be kept to a minimum.
Kristina Zanic’s interiors run a desert palette with coral and teal, turtle-shell floor tiles and coral-shaped handles, which sounds twee in a list and reads as coherent in a building where every roof is already a wave. This is the one on this list I would expect to look better in fifteen years than it does in photographs now — an opinion, but not a wild one: cedar and clay age, and steel and glass mostly just get cleaned.
Nujuma, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve, Ummahat
A few minutes away on the same island group, also low, also pale: Foster + Partners’ shell forms, with Dewan as executive architect. Geometric patterns borrowed from regional design motifs, indigenous planting framing the paths between pavilions, interiors of woven Saudi rugs, local art and found objects. It is the sort of program that reads as boilerplate on a fact sheet until you notice the property has also put twenty-eight thousand mangroves into the ground and protects turtle nests on its own beaches.
The setting is doing a great deal of the work — this is the only Ritz-Carlton Reserve in the Kingdom, thirty-odd kilometers offshore from the airport, on a reef system the operator calls the world’s fourth largest. But the detail I keep returning to is smaller. There is a telescope in every villa. That tells you precisely what the operator expects you to do with the evening.
Source: Kengo Kuma and Associates · Photograph © Nicola Maniero
Desert Rock, the Hejaz mountains
Sixty-four keys, twenty minutes inland from the airport, reached through a valley you cannot see until you are inside it. Oppenheim Architecture named the room categories after the geology rather than the price list — Wadi Villas, Cliff Hanging Villas, Mountain Cave Suites, Mountain Crevice Villas — and the cave suites are entered through a tunnel. Stone taken out during excavation went back into the buildings; the concrete was coloured and textured to hold the same light as the rock around it.
Studio Paolo Ferrari’s interiors are raw concrete, hand-troweled plaster, honed limestone, patinated bronze and wood both charred and sandblasted, with around two hundred custom furnishings and sand-cast hardware. It is the rare hotel interior that does not soften the building it sits in.
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Six Senses Southern Dunes, Umluj
Foster + Partners again, and here the decision is the interesting part: a Red Sea resort that declines the Red Sea. Southern Dunes sits inland on the historic incense trade route, dunes in front and the Hijaz mountains behind, thirty-six rooms and suites and forty pool villas arranged around a central oasis. The architecture is an explicit homage to Nabataean building; the interiors take their colors from the sand and their patterns from Bedouin dress.
The details that follow from that decision are the good ones. Water surfaces are self-shaded rather than shaded by structures added on top of them. The spa runs over two floors instead of sprawling. The villas sit around the oasis rather than in a line facing a horizon, because there is no horizon here worth lining up for — there is a dune field, and dune fields are better looked at from inside than across.
Anyone can put a villa on a beach. Turning down four hundred miles of coastline requires a point of view.
Source: Red Sea Global / Oppenheim Architecture
Banyan Tree AlUla, Ashar Valley
Forty-seven tented villas on the floor of a sandstone canyon, with high ceilings and structured canopies rather than the sort of tent that is really a bungalow wearing a hat. The handcrafted detailing is Arabian and specific, and the whole thing is pitched — the operator’s word is inspired — by the valley rather than by a brand template flown in from Phuket.
What makes it beautiful is inherited. The valley walls run several stories above the villas and change color through the afternoon. The resort’s contribution is mostly the good sense to stay low, and that is not a small contribution: half the sites in AlUla could have supported a four-story building, and a four-story building would have ruined every one of them.
Dar Tantora The House Hotel, AlUla Old Town
Thirty earth-clad dars inside AlUla’s old town, restored by Shahira Fahmy Architects using the same materials and techniques as the nine hundred surviving traditional houses around them. The mumud-brickalls, the stonework, the windows, and the murals are original. The murals were painted as wedding gifts; they depict flora, fauna, household objects, calligraphy and abstract symbols, and they were brought back with natural pigments.
The hotel is lit by candlelight. The original irrigation and ventilation systems were restored and put back to work. The plan follows light and shade through the seasons — the tantora, the sundial the hotel is named for, is not decoration but the operating logic of the place.
Source: Dar Tantora The House Hotel
The Chedi Hegra, AlUla
The most remarkable of the eight, and the least invented. Milan’s Gio Forma took the Hegra train station, completed in 1907, and turned it and the structures around it into thirty-five rooms, suites and villas inside a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Original stone walls were kept and built from. A seven-hundred-meter shading canopy, Lamellae, runs the length of the old track.
And sitting in the middle of it is Locomotive 964, a 2-6-0 built in 1906, restored over a year and more than fifteen thousand hours of work. Nobody needed a working-looking locomotive to make a hotel function, on a railway that has not carried a passenger in a century.
The restraint is what impresses. A hotel inside a World Heritage Site could have been an argument with its surroundings — a glass insertion, a signature roof, something to photograph. Instead, the rooms were made out of buildings that were already standing, and the one piece of pure spectacle on the property is a hundred-and-twenty-year-old machine that somebody decided to make beautiful again.
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What the best of them have in common
None of these hotels is beautiful because it is expensive. They are beautiful because, at their best, they know when architecture should announce itself and when it should disappear. Shebara turns the villa into an object and makes no apology for it. Desert Rock buries it. The Chedi Hegra inherited a building that was already worth saving and had the discipline to do very little to it.
The weaker version of this same boom — and it exists, on the same coastline — starts with a rendering and then looks for a site that will tolerate it—the eight above start with the place. If you are choosing one, choose by which landscape you actually want to be inside for four days, because in every case the building has already made that decision for you.
Architectural and operating detail checked against the architects’ and operators’ own published material, 11 August 2026.
Featured Image Source: GHM Hotels / The Chedi Hegra
