The Oceanic Resort Spa Hotel at Khor Fakkan, in the United Arab Emirates, is a completed luxury hotel and spa, and one of the projects that most clearly shows how our interiors practice works at scale.
This is an account of the approach rather than a data sheet. We publish project figures only where the client has agreed to them, so what follows is about method: how a hotel interior of this kind is taken from a brief to an operating building, and where these projects succeed or fail.
Why hotel interiors are a different discipline
A private house is designed for one household with known habits. A resort hotel is designed for thousands of guests a year who arrive tired, unfamiliar with the building, and forming a judgement about the property within the first minute of walking into the lobby.
That changes the design problem in three ways.
Everything is used harder than you expect. Finishes, ironmongery, upholstery and floor junctions in a hotel take a volume of wear that would take decades to accumulate in a home. Specification is not a matter of appearance; it is a durability calculation with an appearance requirement attached.
The building has to work for staff as well as guests. Housekeeping routes, back-of-house access, linen and waste movement, service risers and the discipline of keeping all of it invisible from the guest side. A beautiful scheme that forces a housekeeper to cross a lobby with a trolley has failed.
Climate drives the specification. Where a resort sits on a coast, salt-laden air, high humidity and intense sunlight punish metals, fabrics, timber and coatings. Materials that perform indefinitely in a temperate inland setting fail quickly in those conditions, and the specification has to allow for it from the outset rather than correcting for it after the first season.
The spa is the hardest part of the building
Within a resort hotel, the spa is consistently the most technically demanding interior. It combines wet and dry areas, high humidity, elevated temperatures, complex drainage, slip resistance requirements, acoustic separation between treatment rooms, controlled lighting for both treatment and circulation, and a guest experience that has to feel calm while a considerable amount of plant runs behind the walls.
It is also the part of the building where the design has to hold up under the closest scrutiny, because guests are stationary, quiet and looking at the ceiling. Detailing that would pass unnoticed in a corridor is very visible from a treatment couch.
How the work is structured
Our interiors follow the BIID stages, and on a project of this scale the stage structure is what keeps a large scope controllable.
Feasibility and design concept. Understanding the operator's positioning, the guest profile, and what the property is competing against. Establishing the narrative that the interior will carry through the public areas, the guest rooms and the spa, so that the building reads as one property rather than a sequence of unrelated rooms.
Spatial coordination. Resolving the plan — circulation, sightlines from the entrance, the relationship between reception, lounge and food and beverage, guest room layouts and the room mix, and the coordination of the interior with the structure and the services. This is the stage where problems are cheap to fix.
Technical information and documentation. The drawing package that lets the work be built and the joinery made: detailed plans, elevations, sections, joinery drawings, finishes schedules and specifications.
FF&E purchasing. Furniture, fixtures and equipment. On a hotel this is a procurement programme in its own right — we issue purchase orders and vendor cheques, track the production cycle with each supplier, and carry out quality control on what is produced. Hospitality projects are more often derailed by procurement than by design: a long-lead item ordered late, or a supplier substituting a specification without approval, will delay an opening date in a way that no drawing revision ever does.
Project administration. Running the work through to completion, with the same single point of contact throughout.
You can read more about how these stages work on our interior design page.
Working across studios
Our interior design work across the Middle East is overseen by Joyce Baraké Chebli, our Interior Design Director, who heads the Beirut studio. Joyce has over seventeen years of international interior design experience and studied Interior Design at USEK University in Lebanon.
The two-studio structure — Norwich and Beirut — is what allows us to work on a resort in the Emirates and a village hall in South Norfolk with the same process. Regional presence matters in hospitality work: proximity to suppliers and fabricators, the ability to inspect production and to attend site during installation, and familiarity with how procurement actually operates in the region.
What this project demonstrates
That we deliver hospitality interiors of significant scale to completion, including the procurement and quality control that sits behind the finished photographs, and that our practice runs from concept through to handover rather than handing a concept package to somebody else to realise.
The Oceanic Resort Spa Hotel sits alongside our other hospitality work, which includes interiors for the St Giles Hotel Group in London, guest rooms, reception lounges and the main restaurant at St Giles Heathrow, and a restaurant in Dubai. The rest of the portfolio is on our work page.
Discuss a hospitality project
If you are an operator, asset manager or developer planning a refurbishment or a new property, we would be glad to talk about it. Our hotel interiors and hospitality and leisure design pages set out the scope we cover, and the initial conversation is free.
Call +44 (0) 1508 830 310 or email info@archidite.com.