The St. Regis Saadiyat Island Resort

Fronting Saadiyat Island’s natural beach in Abu Dhabi, The St Regis Saadiyat Island Resort occupies a position on the 1.3-kilometre crescent of white sand that constitutes the most significant natural beach in the immediate Abu Dhabi capital area, with the Saadiyat Island’s cultural district — the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project, and the Zayed National Museum — established within walking distance of the resort’s beach frontage. The 372 rooms and suites are distributed through a series of low-rise structures that maintain the resort’s visual relationship with the beach and the Gulf, and the extensive pool and beach infrastructure gives it the most complete resort experience available in the Abu Dhabi capital area without requiring departure to the Emirates of Ras al Khaimah or Fujairah.

The restaurant programme spanning Roberto’s Italian, Olea for contemporary Mediterranean cuisine, and the beachfront grill provides a dining range appropriate to a resort of this scale, and the Iridium Spa’s programme draws on Arabian wellness traditions alongside its international treatment menu. The proximity of the Louvre Abu Dhabi — one of the most architecturally significant museums built anywhere in the world in the past decade, under Jean Nouvel’s vast perforated dome — gives hotel guests an access to one of the region’s premier cultural institutions that the Saadiyat Beach address makes effortless. The nesting hawksbill turtle beaches adjacent to the resort are protected as part of the island’s environmental management programme.

The St Regis Saadiyat Island’s position on what is still one of the Gulf’s most intact natural beaches, at the intersection of the UAE’s most ambitious cultural development and the last fragments of the emirate’s original coastal ecology, gives it a particular quality of environmental and cultural layering that distinguishes it from the purpose-built beach resort developments of the more heavily developed UAE coastal zones.