More than 25 years after opening its gilded doors, Dubai’s most iconic hotel, Jumeirah Burj Al Arab, has closed for restoration works.
During the planned 18-month closure, the hotel’s distinctive interiors will be enhanced, preserved, and upgraded by celebrated French interior architect Tristan Auer, who’s reimagined his fair share of hotel greats, from the Carlton Cannes to Paris’s Hôtel de Crillon.
But how, exactly, do you reinterpret an icon? “It’s kind of a science,” he tells me on a morning call from his Paris studio. “The Burj Al Arab is one of the most well-known, important, and recognized hotels in the world. As a designer, you have to be respectful—to watch, listen, and see how people behave in this hotel.
“The vision of His Highness with the original design was just incredible. It’s the taste of Dubai and the vision of a man, and for that, I cannot damage it. So I have to put my feet in his shoes to be able to understand and to enhance.”
Jumeirah Burj Al Arab has many defining features. Designed to resemble the sail of a traditional dhow, the hotel is among the city’s most recognizable landmarks, standing as a symbol of Dubai’s unending ambition. Inside, it is equally distinctive. Cascading fountains and aquariums filled with 400 species of fish, sharks, and rays sit at the foot of its towering 180-meter atrium. Some 1,790 square meters of 24-carat gold leaf run throughout, alongside 86,500 hand-fixed Swarovski crystals. More than 30 types of Statuario marble—the same stone used by Michelangelo—cloak nearly 24,000 square meters of walls and flooring. Tourists without a reservation here pay to tour its halls, just to peek behind the curtain of its duplex suites, with their mirrored ceilings, mosaiced washrooms, and Jacuzzi bathtubs. Its design has always been loudly, unapologetically opulent, and that, Auer says, will not change.
