Built on an artificial island 280 metres off Jumeirah Beach and completed in 1999, the sail-shaped tower designed by Tom Wright of WS Atkins has become so thoroughly synonymous with Dubai that the two are difficult to separate in the imagination. The Burj Al Arab rises 321 metres across 56 floors, its exoskeleton of steel and fibreglass forming a billowing double-skinned facade that at night becomes a canvas for shifting coloured light. The brief was explicit from the outset: produce an icon for a city still writing its identity, something instantly recognisable from sea and sky alike. Wright delivered a structure with no direct precedent in hotel architecture — the sail form borrowed from maritime tradition but achieving a scale that belongs to a different category entirely. The interiors, designed by Khuan Chew of KCA International, commit fully to maximalism. Gold leaf, deep royal purple, and cobalt blue saturate the 202 duplex suites, with gilded four-poster beds draped in floor-pooling velvet canopies, mirrored ceiling coffers, and tufted ottomans in scarlet damask arranged with theatrical confidence. The palette visible in the images carries an Art Deco sensibility filtered through sheer excess — brass torchère lamps, curved sideboard forms with button-leather panels, and bold geometric artwork set in gold frames. Up at the Al Muntaha restaurant, suspended 200 metres above the Gulf on a cantilevered platform, floor-to-ceiling glass panels dissolve the boundary between dining room and open sky, polished chrome columns reflecting an unbroken turquoise horizon.

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