Foster + Partners rarely turn their hand to hotel design, which makes The Lana, Dorchester Collection, Dubai a genuinely unusual proposition — a 30-storey tower on Marasi Bay Marina where the architecture has been engineered as much for comfort as for spectacle. The building's twin-tower massing, connected by a glazed mid-section and visible from across Business Bay's waterway, deploys deep overhanging floor plates as passive cooling devices, while seven interlocking vertical gardens stitch greenery into the facade at intervals. Every room receives a private balcony — a consequence of the deliberately slender floor plates — and the whole composition, finished in warm champagne tones, catches the Gulf light differently through the day. Inside, Parisian duo Gilles & Boissier have translated the UAE's desert landscape into an interior palette of considerable restraint: raw and polished marble, alabaster detailing, and muted earth tones that run from warm cream through terracotta. The 225 rooms carry this language with particular confidence — textured linen headboards, rosewood millwork, and pendant lights in smoked amber glass give the guestrooms a quiet richness that avoids the aggressive glamour common to the city. The rooftop infinity pool, with the Burj Khalifa aligned at one end of its sightline, shifts the register entirely — all travertine and cream linen cabanas. Then there is the bar, whose ceiling installation of what appears to be hundreds of amber glass fragments suspended above a circular counter reintroduces the drama, on its own terms.

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