Saudi Arabia’s cinemas reopened in 2018 after thirty-five years, and the country has been building them at speed ever since — mostly the same multiplex that exists everywhere else. Via Riyadh went the other way. It built seven, gave each one a different architectural idea, and made the room the product.
There is a hall styled after a vintage train carriage, called Orient Express. There is Tuwaiq, arranged as a majlis with ground seating and detailing drawn from Najdi building. There is Secret Garden with reclining seats under a planted aesthetic, Wall Street in deep blue, Oasis with Dolby Atmos and a Samsung Onyx screen, Interstellar and Avant Garde. Somebody understood that if the film is identical everywhere, the only variable left is where you sit.
Source: FACT Magazines
Source: LIST
What the place is
Via Riyadh opened to the public on 11 May 2023, in the Al Hada district next to the Ritz-Carlton, and it is not a mall. It is a compound: boutiques, restaurants, a theatre, the cinemas and a hotel, arranged as streets rather than corridors.
It is built in the Salmani style, the architectural language the state has been formalising around six stated values — authenticity, human-centricity, liveability, continuity, innovation and sustainability. In practice that means low, warm-toned, courtyarded, shaded, and legible as belonging to Najd rather than to Dubai. Whatever one thinks of design-by-doctrine, the result here is a great deal more pleasant to walk through than the alternative would have been.
The hotel
The St. Regis Riyadh sits inside the complex — eighty-three keys, fifty-nine rooms and twenty-four suites, the brand’s first in the Kingdom. Its rooftop, Stella Sky Lounge, and its restaurant, Jackie, both appear on Via Riyadh’s own listings, which is the tell: the hotel is not a tenant of the district so much as a component of it.
Eighty-three keys is small for a capital-city flagship, and deliberately so. This is a hotel for people who came for the district.
The restaurants
The current line-up runs to Gymkhana, the Indian kitchen from London; Berenjak, Persian, also from London; Madeo for Italian; Hōchō, billed as the city’s first premium Japanese and Silk Road fusion restaurant; Ferdi; Sudds and Qahwa as social rooms; Over Under, a café that becomes a mocktail bar; the members-only Vega cigar lounge; and the two St. Regis venues.
The 2023 opening roster was longer and starrier still — Sexy Fish, Scott’s, Spago, Les Deux Magots, Wagyumafia, Raoul’s, Chi Spacca — and the district’s published list has changed since. Which of those are still trading is not something any source states plainly, so check the current listing rather than a magazine’s memory.
The pattern is unmistakable regardless: this is an import strategy. London, Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo and New York, transplanted whole. It is the fastest way to build a dining district and the least interesting, and Via Riyadh is at its best where it departs from it.
The shopping, and the surprise in it
Fourteen names on the current list, and the interesting thing is how few of them are the obvious ones. Elie Saab, Isaia from Naples, L’Atelier Nawbar with a jewellery lineage back to 1891, Maria Tash, Roberto Coin, Dolce & Gabbana, Mwaz, and Clé — several of them flagged as exclusive to Via Riyadh in the Kingdom.
Alongside them: Aesop, a florist, a barbershop, a salon, and two galleries — Artfeena, and a Richard Orlinski space. A district that puts a florist and a barber next to Elie Saab is describing itself accurately. It wants to be somewhere people go on a Thursday, not a duty-free hall with a roof.
Who it is for
Via Riyadh is a Riyadh destination rather than a tourist one. On a weekend evening the crowd is local, well dressed and there to be seen, and the district has the particular energy of somewhere a city has adopted rather than somewhere built for visitors and populated by them.
For a traveller that is the appeal. You are not in a resort environment and nobody is performing hospitality at you. You are in the part of Riyadh where Riyadh goes out, which is a more interesting evening than any hotel bar in the city can offer.
Read also: The best table in Riyadh faces a ruin
The theatre nobody mentions
There is a live theatre in the complex, inaugurated a week after opening by Abdul Majeed Abdullah — which, for anyone who has not followed Saudi music, is roughly the equivalent of opening a London venue with a national institution rather than a support act.
It is a small detail and it says what the district is for. Via Riyadh was unveiled as a Riyadh Season zone before it became a permanent destination, and the performance programming is the residue of that: not a shopping centre with a stage, but an entertainment venue that acquired boutiques.
Source: FACT Magazines
What the Salmani style actually is
It is easy to be cynical about an architectural language defined by decree, and Salmani is exactly that: a style formalised by the state around six named values, now applied across public and semi-public projects in Riyadh. Design by doctrine has a poor historical record.
But the specifics are sound. Low buildings, thick walls, deep shade, courtyards, a warm limestone-and-earth palette, and a preference for streets over concourses. Those are Najdi solutions to a Najdi climate, and the alternative on offer in this region for the last thirty years has been glass towers with the air conditioning turned up. Via Riyadh is the most complete built example so far, and walking it at nine in the evening is a persuasive argument for the whole idea.
The comparison people reach for is Dubai, and it does not hold. Dubai’s luxury retail is inside malls, air-conditioned and interior. This is outdoors, and it works because the buildings were shaped to make being outdoors bearable.
Read also: Riyadh: the guide
Is it any good
Yes, with a caveat. As architecture and as urbanism it is the most convincing luxury environment built in Riyadh, and the cinemas alone justify an evening. As a retail proposition it is still assembling itself — the roster has moved a lot in three years, and a district defined by exclusives is only as good as its current tenants.
Go for the room with the beds in it, eat at Gymkhana, and treat the shopping as a bonus rather than the reason. That is not the pitch Via Riyadh makes for itself. It is the truer one.
Featured Image Source: FACT Magazines
