In the glass-tower Club lounge…
The gal is a great believer in the value of club floors in luxury hotels. Yes, some hotels say their whole hotel is ‘club level’ but there are many luxury travellers, especially women, who want a cocoon within a larger environment. This does not mean a women-only floor, although some, like Jumeirah Emirates Towers in Dubai, do ladies-only rooms beautifully. Ritz-Carlton’s clubs are legendary, world over. The seventh floor club lounge of The Ritz-Carlton Grand Canal, Abu Dhabi, is sensational. It is, literally, a glass box on a rooftop, looking down to the Grand Canal 200 feet away.
…look down at the pool area
Look straight down from here and you see the central part of what is essentially an arc-shaped hotel, with add-ons. The main building looks like side-by-side ‘old’ Italian houses, each in a subtle colour different from its neighbours. The add-ons are villas, whose occupants can park underground and emerge, right by their villa (clever, as from above the whole area looks like one big garden). There will also be a restaurant row, with big names from the USA who are not, amazingly, already running culinary outposts in the celebrity-chef-mad UAE.
The infinity pool has a wide ledge for lounging
The hotel’s main pool is infinity edged, with a wide-wide shallow ‘lip’ that intentionally is so set so you can lie looking over the edge, so to speak. I personally use any pool for serious laps, albeit for a short time period, but for those on holiday, basking up the beneficial rays to get as brown, or red, as possible, just lying around in the water is what they want. For mums who want to park their kids while so doing, the hotel’s indoor, air-conditioned kids club is literally 50 feet away.
Kids love their shaded wet area
Lots of kids here are enjoying frolicking in the under-awning wet playground, which looks like lots of fun. We had our own fun, in the form of an outstanding buffet lunch back up in the club lounge and then a tour of the hotel’s array of restaurants, the ones inside the building rather than outside in restaurant row. You could spend your whole time here eatin’ and drinkin’, perhaps Lebanese from Mijana, or great steaks in The Forge.
Dolce lollipops
One favourite, for all ages, is Dolce, a white with orange highlights ice cream and gelato parlour. My eye is drawn, indeed captivated, by the array of ice-creams, set as if it were in Milan, or Rome, or Venice. Which one to have? There are crayons and colouring books on nearby tables. Creativity is encouraged. This place is delightfully whimsical – see the giant lollipops that also form part of Dolce’s decoration. I bet people staying across the Grand Canal, say at the Fairmont or Shangri-La, will take the three-minute boat ride across for ice-cream and gelato.
Richard Riley surveys his terrain
Many of the ideas in this luxury hotel have been put in by the owning company’s boss, Richard Riley – the same creator who posed by the Scott bike at the Abu Dhabi Hilton. Today he has swapped bikes for his steely-turquoise Porsche Carrera which, the gal has to admit, is an ideal way to be chauffeured around town. The only challenge is that there is barely room for the trusty Porsche Rimowa (it has not featured recently but I do assure you it is still constantly on the go, being unpacked on arrival, and packed up again the following morning…).
Detail of the spa…
When a spa says COLOUR, as at Bulgari Hotel London, the gal feels like dancing – OK not necessarily Psy’s Gangnam but dancing on clouds, dancing through life. This is just the effect that the spa gives at what will be St Regis Abu Dhabi. Look at the colours in the wet room in the ladies’ locker area (the bars are wrapped in polythene as the hotel is not yet open – the first guest will arrive this August). Yes, not only another luxury hotel in town, but a second St Regis, a sibling to the fabulous St Regis Saadiyat Island Abu Dhabi.
.. which has amazing chandeliers
The spa here just goes on saying wow, wow. There are 11 treatment rooms, all at least 600 sq ft, which is twice the size of some hotels’ basic bedrooms and more than three times those at the clever Citizen M hotel in Amsterdam, a fun place that conveniently happens to be a couple of blocks from Amsterdam’s RAI conference centre.
The exterior
Some of the spa rooms here have chandeliers, but then the whole hotel seems to be highlighted by chandeliers. Yet more work for the Czech makers who must be supporting their nation’s economy. That would be a good trivia question – which nation has the highest GDP contribution from overhead crystals? This hotel is part of a sculpture-like affair of twin towers, 50 floors high and joined at the top by what will be an 11,000 sq ft – yes, you read that right – an 11,000 sq ft suite, for which you get three proper bedrooms and one tiny one ‘for the maid’. The rest of the hotel will be on floors 33 to 49, and rooms start from 430 sq ft in size.
View from a bathtub
Actually I really liked, at my show-round, what they call Grand Deluxe Suites. You have one shared bedroom and salon, reached by a corridor that goes past the bathroom. This is the pièce de résistance as you have a freestanding oval bathtub with stunning views out of the window. Look down at the grounds of Emirates Palace while you soak, or whatever.
A desert snapper, and sample tasters
I fantasize. Perhaps I would lie in the bathtub drinking the house Bloody Mary. As you by now know, dear reader, every St Regis has its own version of the Bloody Mary that was first invented in the bar of St Regis New York. Here the drink will be a desert snapper, with za’atar once again but here it is smoked, with one of the little hand-held smokers that I first came across in the bar of Ritz-Carlton Vienna. Yes, you can see my mind is wandering the world (just as if I really WERE in the bath drinking not just one but a succession of desert snappers…)
One of the bar’s three paintings
The hotel will have a statuesque bar, just as in all St Regis. There is always a big painting with some local emphasis: here, there are three paintings of horsemen tearing through the desert. I am told by Oliver Key, who will be opening boss of this luxury hotel, that they are by a Russian named Sergei Yatsenko, whose company is called Scythian. Looking at them I think of my friend Wael Soueid at Qasr al Sarab whose hobbies are polo and endurance riding. For the latter, you ride and ride, a hundred miles or more, but you stop at set times for the horses to be medically tested. This is when you might need a desert snapper, or at least you could fantasize about one.
Wolfgang Maier, left, and Richard Riley
For a keen cyclist, a good luxury hotel needs a suitable bike. I first came across Scott bikes when staying at InterContinental Resort Berchtesgaden, 120 miles from Munich, and 700 metres above sea level with marvellously clear air (Berchtesgaden, which produces lovely tastly yoghurt, is birthplace of the Talise nutritonalist the gal wrote about a couple of days ago). Now here, in Abu Dhabi, I am put on a brand new Scott bike at Hilton Abu Dhabi and off I pedal, along the Corniche.
Hilton Abu Dhabi windows open
They are commendably health-aware at this cosy-comfortble resort which is so popular that 20 percent of people staying here come back again and again. Some of them, says the big-boss Wolfgang Maier, who funnily enough also thinks of himself as a Munich Man, return not only for the people who make it all happen but because this is the only hotel in Abu Dhabi where all rooms have windows that open. What a treat this is.
View from room 1002
From the top floor, in room 1002, I can look across the water, blessedly free of jet-skis (I think they are banned here) at what is called Marina Mall, an island reached by a long causeway bridge. I had been given a jogging map, total 13 miles (ha ha!) that would take me along the Corniche, which has a cycle track, and back again and over to Marina Mall and along to the big mosque at the end of it. I did not go quite that far. Having dropped my loaned bike off with the concierge, I was back up on the tenth floor when another guest, obviously a regular, came out of his room in Bradley Wiggins type gear, with a hundred-speed bike, all the works.
Welcome to the party
No fewer than 1,500 locals are members of the hotel’s private beach club, which is packed every day. There are pools, and lounging areas, and squash, and tennis and a big gym. You reach the beach club either directly from the road or via an underground walkway from the hotel. Later, I walked across just as a little girl’s sixth birthday party was about to start. I went into the gym and watched arrivals walk past the window. Some of the invitees were wearing the ultimate Little Princess frocks, and carrying their own gifts for the birthday girl. Others got the maids to carry them (gifts, not Little Princesses). Mothers were dressed in anything from blue jeans to the latest Versace. Presumably there was a gigantic cake.
Outside, at Vasco terrace
I too ate splendidly at the beach club, at the outside terrace of Vasco, Mediterranean plus seafood plus steak, whatever you like. Joseph, the manager in charge, knew exactly what we wanted – the salad bar and a great piece of Aussie beef and a glass of Pinot. I loved the way the water features around the Vasco terrace change day-glo colours as the night progresses.
A breakfast request, in three minutes
This is a luxury hotel for those who prefer their favourite, rather than their newest, pair of shoes, and for those for whom the words Cosy and Comfortable are key. In the tenth floor Club Lounge, I could not see a chef but I asked for an egg white omelette. It came in three minutes, cooked just out of sight by a real chef… I asked if by any chance they had a Financial Times. That took four minutes.