Bulgari Resort Dubai

The original Bulgari Hotel in Milan floored us with its one-two punch of cutting-edge contemporary Italian design and top-shelf, no-expense-spared luxury. For the brand’s entry into the Emirate of Dubai, you can safely assume the latter — and the former is provided by the very same Antonio Citterio and Patricia Viel, whose sober and stylish architecture and interior design adapt modern Milanese elegance to the Middle East. The resulting Bulgari Resort Dubai is at least as impressive as anything in town, and astonishingly tasteful at the same time.

Its setting, on a man-made island in Jumeirah Bay, is what makes it a resort — this is no urban skyscraper hotel, but a low-slung building whose capacious balconies look either straight out to sea or back towards the Dubai skyline. Mashrabiya-style latticework provides an immediate sense of place, while the room and suite interiors by Citterio and Viel make use of the finest high-end Italian design elements — as in the Bulgari Milan, every detail feels perfectly chosen and impossible to improve upon.

And the facilities are similarly high-end, though in keeping with Bulgari’s philosophy, they offer substance as well as style. Il Ristorante - Niko Romito features a menu and staff hand-picked by the eponymous Michelin-starred Italian chef, and it’s joined by chef Masahiro Sugiyama’s Hōseki as well as a couple of more casual venues. Meanwhile the lavish Bulgari Spa is paired with a capacious fitness center, a lovely outdoor pool, and not just a luxe beach club but a yacht club as well. By Dubai’s standards, it’s far from over-the-top, but make no mistake; the Bulgari Resort Dubai is as good as it gets.