Ten years ago a new luxury hotel in Saudi Arabia looked like a new luxury hotel anywhere: marble, double-height lobby, a chandelier doing the heavy lifting. Today the ones worth staying in are made of mud, coral or stone, and are trying rather hard to look like the region they are standing in.
That change is not a coincidence of taste. On 16 March 2025 the Crown Prince launched the Saudi Architecture Characters Map, which defines nineteen distinct regional architectural styles and sets design guidelines against each of them.
The map
The nineteen are: Central Najdi, Northern Najdi, Eastern Najdi, Tabuk Coast, Madinah Rural, Inner Madinah, Hejazi Coast, Taif Highlands, Sarawat Mountains, Aseer Escarpment, Tuhama Foothills, Tuhama Coast, Farasan Islands, Abha Highlands, Bisha Desert, Najran, Al Ahsa Oasis, Al Qatif Oasis and East Coast.
The framework does not demand mud brick. It permits modern materials and sets out three design registers — traditional, transitional and contemporary — so that a hospital and a heritage hotel can both comply without looking alike. The first phase targeted Al-Ahsa, Taif, Makkah and Abha, applied to major projects, government buildings and commercial structures. A fourth phase followed on 30 April 2026, extending residential and commercial guidance across the Riyadh, Makkah and Northern Borders regions and the city of Tabuk. It is overseen by a supreme committee chaired by the Crown Prince, which tells you how seriously it is meant.
Three of the nineteen account for almost everything a visitor will actually see.
Read also: At-Turaif: the mud-brick capital behind the restaurants
Najdi: the mud one
Central Arabia builds out of the ground beneath it. Unbaked mud brick on limestone footings, palm and tamarisk timber above, the whole thing rendered in clay mud and, where it matters, plastered and limewashed. Rooms arrange around internal courtyards. Parapets are crenellated. Walls are thick enough to hold the night’s cool through the afternoon.
The detail everyone photographs is the triangular opening, cut high in the wall. The usual explanation is ventilation, and that is only a third of it: at Al Masmak in Riyadh, the small triangular windows are described as serving ventilation, light and the deflection of rainwater. Three jobs, one shape, no moving parts.
Al Masmak is the reference building — raised in 1865 under Imam Abdullah bin Faisal bin Turki, with four corner towers eighteen metres high, a fifth crenellated rectangular tower, and a western gate built of palm trunks measuring 3.6 by 2.65 metres. King Abdulaziz took it in 1902. At-Turaif at Diriyah, inscribed by UNESCO in 2010, is the ensemble version, described in the citation as using adobe with a remarkable sense of geometrical decoration.
You can now eat inside a modern version of it. Bujairi Terrace, inaugurated in November 2022 across fifteen thousand square metres, was built using mud brick and Najdi elements dating back three hundred years, and holds more than three thousand people. It is the vernacular scaled to a restaurant district, and it works.
Source: Anne and David, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Hijazi: the coral one
The Red Sea coast solved a different problem and arrived somewhere almost opposite.
Historic Jeddah was inscribed by UNESCO in 2014. Its signature is the roshan tower house, which UNESCO calls a unique architectural typology within the Arab and Muslim world — built largely in the late nineteenth century by merchants grown rich on the pilgrim trade, with ground floors given to offices and commerce and upper floors rented out to pilgrims.
The construction is coral masonry, quarried from the reef offshore, with elaborate woodwork on the facades brought in along the Indian Ocean trade routes. The projecting timber lattice bays are the point of the whole system: they let air move through a room without letting anyone see into it.
Here is the detail that makes the comparison with Najd worth drawing. Najdi houses turn inward, around a courtyard. Hijazi tower houses do not have courtyards at all. Facing the humidity of the Red Sea rather than the dry heat of the interior, they orient outward and pull air through the timber screens instead. Two vernaculars, one country, opposite answers, both correct.
Naseef House in Al-Balad is the one to walk through. It became King Abdulaziz’s residence in Jeddah after he took the city in 1925, and its internal ramps were built wide and shallow enough for camels to climb to the upper terrace. The neem tree at its entrance was once said to be the only tree in Jeddah.
Source: Heritage Commission, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Asiri: the painted one
The southwest is the least visited and the most surprising. In Asir, buildings are stone and mud in layered courses, rising to three storeys, and historically built as much for defence as for dwelling.
Rijal Almaa, on Saudi Arabia’s UNESCO tentative list since August 2015, is roughly sixty stone-and-clay palaces functioning as forts. The largest, Al-Elwan Fort, became the village museum in 1985. In 2021 the village was named one of the UN World Tourism Organization’s Best Tourism Villages.
What sets Asir apart is inside. Al-Qatt Al-Asiri, inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage in 2017, is a mural tradition practised by the women of the province — the qattatah. The name means cutting horizontally, for the line that divides the wall. The palette is red, yellow, black and blue, and the patterns are named: triangles, rhombuses, parallel lines, lattices, and forms called the girls, the arbours, the prayer niches. The more complex the walls of a household’s majlis, the wealthier the household was understood to be.
It is the only one of the three traditions where the decisive work was done by women, and it is the only one that is still an active practice rather than a restored one.
Where you can actually sleep in it
Bab Samhan at Diriyah opened in December 2024 with 134 rooms in low-contour mudbrick, open courtyards, sand-hued walls and traditional Najdi doors — the most literal application of the Najdi register in a luxury hotel.
Dar Tantora in AlUla Old Town took thirty existing mudbrick houses and restored them, within a settlement of more than nine hundred traditional homes that was named a Best Tourism Village in 2022.
And two well-known properties that are not examples of any of this, despite frequently being described as such. Six Senses Southern Dunes, by Foster + Partners, takes its cues from Nabataean heritage — the rock-cut civilisation of the northwest, not the settled vernaculars of Najd, the Hijaz or Asir. Banyan Tree AlUla is a tented resort echoing Bedouin nomadic tradition, which is a different lineage again.
The distinction matters because the interesting thing about Saudi hotel architecture right now is precision. The country has just spent considerable effort defining nineteen regional characters. A hotel that borrows from the wrong one is not being regionally sensitive. It is being decorative.
Why this is more than styling
Vernacular architecture is usually treated as heritage — something to conserve behind a rope. What is happening in Saudi Arabia is different: a state has taken nineteen building traditions, written design guidance against each, and applied it to new construction under a committee chaired by the Crown Prince.
It could produce something excellent, or it could produce nineteen kinds of pastiche. The evidence so far — At-Turaif, Bujairi, Dar Tantora, Bab Samhan — is more encouraging than sceptics expected, mostly because the underlying traditions were engineering solutions before they were styles. Thick walls, small openings and courtyards work. Coral and timber screens work. They were arrived at over centuries by people with no air conditioning and every incentive to get it right.
Featured Image Source: Richard Mortel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
