 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Luxury unabashed
By David Hirst
Have you ever felt the need to sleep in a revolving bed? Or dine in an underwater restaurant to which you are conveyed by submarine? If so, the Borj Al-Arab, or Arabian Tower, is the place for you. Newly opened on a man-made island in the Gulf, Borj Al-Arab was immediately classified as the tallest, most luxurious hotel in the world.
A nautical skyscraper and revolving beds: Dubai now boasts the most luxurious hotel in the world
The massive four-posters, fit for Henry VIII, which take you round and round in your sleep at a suitably soporific pace -- those are for real. The 10-seater submarine is only virtual reality. All it does, actually, is take you from the lobby to one level below; but it simulates the real thing. With aquatic sights, sounds and motions, not to mention fish that peer into your porthole, it whets your appetite for the striped Gulf prawns or Iranian caviar that await you below.
Extravaganzas like this are commonplace in modern Dubai. The dusty little pre-oil, pre-independence trading outpost of barely 30 years ago is now one of the world's most polyglot and modern cities; a would-be Côte d'Azur, or Miami, of the Gulf to boot. It is a city of superlatives, with the Guinness Book of Records on almost permanent stand-by to certify them.
But the Borj Al-Arab is in a class by itself.
It might not be to everyone's taste. British travel writer Isabel Lloyd said, rather snootily, that, along with the wealthy Arabs, minor African royalties and the Sultan of Brunei's daughter (all of whom have already stayed here), Madonna would simply love such a temple of gaudy excess. Two-thousand square metres of the edifice's surface is covered in 22-carat gold -- and all that is not gold is shining marble and mosaic, or the plushest of carpets in the most violent of primary colours. But as an engineering and architectural tour de force -- the recherché quality of the materials, say, or its sometimes arresting use of regional themes (Petra and ancient Egypt, for example) -- the place cannot be dismissed as just another super-rich oil sheikh's folly.
This would not be Dubai if it did not break all the more obviously measurable records. Dimensions: at 321 metres, it is taller than the Eiffel Tower and only 60 metres short of the Empire State Building. Cost: almost certainly a record too, but one that, unlike its height, the Guinness Book of Records will not be invited to certify. But experts advance the figure of $1 billion-plus for this and an adjoining establishment, internationally acclaimed as well.
Unique features: It may not be the only hotel in the world with a helicopter to transport its guests, but it is the only one where you alight on a helipad, suspended like some giant soap-holder, 200 metres above the ocean. If you come by merely terrestrial means, one of the hotel's six Rolls-Royce Silver Seraphs will fetch you from the airport.
The most appropriate means of arrival would be in your own yacht, for Borj Al-Arab is overwhelmingly nautical in theme -- an homage to the seafaring traditions of a community whose traders still ply the Gulf and Indian Ocean in stout wooden dhows. It is entirely surrounded by the sea, linked to the mainland by a causeway from which your ordinary resident, eager to catch a glimpse of how the other half lives, will be turned back -- unless he pays a $60 entrance fee (redeemable in purchases on the premises).
The whole structure is shaped like a billowing sail: this "screen of double-skinned Teflon-coated woven glass fibre" is -- it goes without saying -- the largest-ever use of such materials in the world.
There is water everywhere, and the knowledge that it is expensively desalinated (as almost all fresh water is in this very arid land) does more than the gold and titanium, the Azul Bahia granite from Brazil or the rare Sicis glass from Italy, to proclaim: here is luxury unabashed.
A burning flame within flowing water greets you at the entrance. As you ascend by escalator to the foyer, you are flanked by glass walls, behind which exotic fish sport amid the coral, and, in the centre, by a waterfall that splashes down a giant's staircase. In the atrium -- which, at 182 metres, is naturally the highest in the world -- another fountain plays all manner of aquatic tricks, vaguely suggestive now of dolphins then of frogs, and completes its performance with a jet of water that shoots half-way to the ceiling and falls back, with amazing precision, right within the fountain basin. On the 18th floor, the waters of the ladies' bathing pool, a sort of Abu Simbel in the sky, seem to blend dreamily with the sea below.
Upon arrival, no traditional reception desk awaits you. You go straight to your appointed floor, where your personal, 24-hour butler checks you in and guides you through your two-floor, multi-roomed, 178-square-metre suite, your self-disinfecting jacuzzi, countless telephones, surround-sound plasma television screens and a dazzling array of interactive business and entertainment tools.
Those are just the ordinary, one-bedroom pads, of which there are 164, going for $817 a night. There is also a wide range of bigger, better and more expensive ones. But if you want the revolving bed you have to go for one of the two royal suites; and with it, in this pinnacle of hotel opulence, comes all the space you are likely to need (780 square metres of it). A royal suite will cost you $6,138 a night: it includes an internal escalator, a salon for receiving your guests and boudoirs the size of most people's living rooms. If that seems pricey, just reflect for a moment: in what establishment on Park Lane or Fifth Avenue would you get a full-scale mansion for a bagatelle like that?
