Desert Luxury: The World's Finest Sand-and-Sky Resorts

The desert has always been a place of spiritual and aesthetic extremity — a landscape whose violence of climate and abstraction of form has attracted those seeking clarity, silence, and the particular beauty of a world reduced to light and rock. The luxury resort's appropriation of this archetype has produced some of the most architecturally distinguished and experientially powerful hospitality projects of the past two decades. At its best, the desert resort amplifies the desert's qualities — the immensity of the sky, the silence, the dramatic transformation from day to night — while providing the physical comfort and service intelligence that allow guests to inhabit this environment without the discomforts that the desert naturally produces.

Amangiri in Canyon Point, Utah, is the benchmark against which all other desert resorts are measured. Designed by Marwan Al-Sayed, Wendell Burnette, and Rick Joy in a collaboration that resulted in one of the most significant pieces of American architecture of the past thirty years, the resort wraps a series of concrete pavilions around a butte of Navajo sandstone, the building materials — desert grey concrete, warm wood, pale stone — drawn from the same chromatic vocabulary as the landscape. The 34 suites are arranged to provide absolute privacy from other guests while sharing the experience of the canyon's spatial drama: each suite's principal window frames a view that is compositionally specific to that room's position, so that no two guests see the same desert from their beds. The spa's central feature — a pool wrapped around the sandstone butte, its surface flush with the desert floor — is one of the most photographed architectural details in American resort design.

In the Arabian Peninsula, the Al Faya Lodge in the Sharjah desert and the Al Maha Desert Resort in the Dubai Conservation Reserve offer contrasting expressions of the desert luxury concept. Al Maha, which opened in 1999 and was one of the first desert luxury resorts in the Gulf region, operates within a wildlife conservation area that protects the Arabian oryx, gazelle, and sand gazelle from the incursions of the surrounding development. Its 42 suites — tented pavilions in the Bedouin tradition, air-conditioned and furnished to a standard that the tradition's nomadic practitioners would have found baroque — offer the specific pleasure of seeing these animals from one's private pool terrace in the early morning, before the desert heat has driven them to shade. The sense of inhabiting a genuine wilderness — even a protected, managed, artificially maintained one — within 45 minutes of Dubai International Airport is one of the most unexpected hospitality experiences available in the region.