Sky’s the limit in opulent Dubai
Alexander Armstrong is blown away by the relentless expansion of Dubai – where nothing is too large, tall or luxurious
DUBAI is always fascinating – from a scientific point of view, I mean. The world’s most expensive biodome experiment, so massive they didn’t even bother with the dome. On to the surface of a desert, money is hosed in such unquantifiable volumes that there is almost an illusion of constancy to the shining pools of the stuff that gather before disappearing into the sand.
And where money pools, glamour and those that seek it magically appear, like water-boatmen in a paddling pool. Here is sun! Here is sea! And here, freighted in from lands afar, is sand!
The poor tired sea does its best, of course, but where it has been lagooned around The Palm it just can’t muster a tide, so each night the beaches are faithfully hoovered and bashed into shape by human hand. In truth, humanity is the only thing that surges, sucks and crashes on to this particular coastline, so it’s kind of poetic that we’ve taken on some of the sand duties too.
When we were last in Dubai five years ago, the expansion was still so new you could ride across the clean, clean asphalt of the city in next to no time. No journey was longer than 20 minutes and car wheels were pristine because the roads were still slick.
Now it seems other cars have arrived. Thousands upon thousands of them. Happily there is so much to gawp at in Dubai that time spent stationary on its roads isn’t altogether tedious.
We blissfully gazed at the triple-decker Lamborghini showroom, where on one floor alone there were more pointy cars in lurid colours than you’d care to see in a lifetime.
In Dubai, the highly polished sits right next to the highly unfinished, and, as a lover of process, that excites me in a way I can’t really describe. This city is expanding in every direction like the mighty inhalation of a lung, and to thrust your hand in and feel that current is utterly intoxicating.
Buildings are soaring up at such a rate that one wonders how they’ll be able to make up addresses for them fast enough. Our hotel, Dukes, was so new that it was off-knowledge for most taxi drivers. They would just look bewildered when we asked to be taken there; alas, directions such as ‘just before the hoardings by the big building site’ didn’t really help.
The name of our hotel is one branded into the affections of many through its St James’s base, the hotel where Ian Fleming would stay and from whose bar so many epic nights have been launched by Salvatore Calabrese’s famous martinis (‘They’re like breasts,’ he once explained to me with terrible gravity. ‘One is not enough. Three? Too many…’)
It’s hard not to be curious as to how faithfully this Dubai outpost might evoke its introverted British sister: that cosy, understated Edwardian grande dame a stone’s throw from St James’s Palace.
The honest answer is, I suspect identity fraud. Dukes St James’s should check its credit card bills or perhaps be shredding its recycling more thoroughly. That’s not to say Dukes Dubai isn’t impressive – if anything, it’s too impressive. It has that statutory broad lobby with lofty chandeliers and marble so terrifyingly shiny it makes your hips want to replace themselves.
But why, if they wanted to conjure up a whiff of genuine London posh, didn’t they use old marble? Or better still, mercilessly scrub the black and white marble they’ve got until it took on the shabby, worn appearance of a St James’s entrance? That and a few threadbare rugs and a brolly stand would have shouted Dukes Hotel at a volume even its oldest London clientele would hear.
The artful black-and-white photographs of telephone boxes and the countless reproductions of exactly the same aristocratic portrait of a man in military scarlet (Wellington? Is he the Dook?), which appear several times in most of the rooms, have the feel of what a British Consulate might look like if designed as a task on The Apprentice.
But here’s what you need to know. The staff at Dukes Dubai are totally brilliant: helpful, courteous and efficient. Our rooms were comfortable and suited our needs perfectly – and with six of us in two interconnecting rooms that’s no easy achievement. But there are a couple of things Dukes will need to sort out over time. If you’re there when it’s busy (and we undoubtedly were), then the pleasing boutique thing they’ve got going on isn’t up to dealing with the volume of guests. Walking through the lobby to get to the beach, you have to squeeze apologetically through the crowds queuing at reception, while popping back to your room to fetch a pair of swimming goggles means a five-minute wait for one of only two lifts serving 15 floors.
The route to the beach takes you down an attractive V-shaped promenade squeezed in between the wings of the Oceana apartments that occupy the rest of the Dukes lot. I rather loved this area with its high sides; it had a comforting, calm city acoustic with birds and their noises reflecting off the windows. And there was almost a magical sense, as I took in its green spaces, walkways, squiggling ‘lazy river’ and bridges, that I might be walking through the architect’s impression of the space – a couple of pencilsketched female executives having high-powered working lunches here and there were all that were missing.
However, when you arrive at the beach and pool area, you discover another seam of the hotel that groans when the place is full. I suspect this space is shared with the apartments in FAST LIVING: One of the swanky Lamborghinis in a Dubai showroom. Left: The marble-filled lobby at the Dukes Dubai hotel
AT NIGHT THE SAND IS BASHED INTO SHAPE BY HUMAN HAND
the complex - of which there are tons - because in a strange evocation of Blightly in 1950s, there were row upon row of bodies on sunbeds and remarkably little space to edge between them. And if so many of the hotel's guests were queuing in reception, then who were all these new people?
But to be absolutely plain, Dubai is a thrill. Just like the people there, the food is rich, varied and plentiful. There is so much to do and see, not least through your car window.
For children it's hard to conceive of a better holiday (and as a parent, that's all you ask). It's safe, it's clean, it's expensively exotic if you want expensively exotic, but there's also a Marks & Spencer, if that's your particular bag for life. The trick, we found, is to go out and explore. Every hotel with a swanky beachfront will sell you a day pass, so wallow in as many as you like, and then each night get the Dukes concierge to book you into a top restaurant.
We ate exceptional Levantine food under the stars on tasseled floor cushions one night, then dined on the balcony of the Armani restaurant the next (oh yes, in Dubai even the restaurants have catwalk labels). From there you watch the fountains at the foot of the Burj Khalifa dance to music that’s pumped directly to your solar plexus from street speakers the size of gun placements.
Jets of water shoot up to 30 storeys high and your eyes will go prickly with sheer delight. They do a song every 20 minutes or so, and the first time it happens you can be forgiven for thinking the world is about to end or someone has got a racy ringtone a few tables away. Dukes needs to be used and enjoyed for what it is: a pied-aterre. And that, of course, is the family resemblance to its St James’s forebear.
It’s sweet and it’s run by spectacularly good people who’ll do their damnedest to make sure your day is lovely, so make the most of them.
Swan off into the rest of Dubai, explore as fully and as far as you dare, knowing you’ll come back to a place where they’ll recognise you – and remember how many martinis you’re allowed.
HARD TO CONCEIVE OF A BETTER HOLIDAY FOR CHILDREN