BG
By iMaker Group
On designing a resort that honours the landscape rather than escapes it
3 Min Read
01.07.2026
- Blog
There is an assumption buried in most luxury resort design: that the land is a problem to be solved. Climate-controlled corridors, interior pools and hermetic lobbies are all designed to make the location irrelevant. To protect the guest from where they are.
This project begins from the opposite position. The desert outside Riyadh is not a backdrop; it is the reason to be here. Our brief was to give guests five distinct ways of being inside it, each one rooted in a tradition that Arab culture has refined over thousands of years; each one feeling, in a different way, like an arrival.
The Bedouin called it bait al sha'ar (the House of Hair). Woven from goat and camel wool by the women of the tribe, it was the most sophisticated climate response the desert had ever produced. The fibres absorbed the harshest daytime heat, while the loose weave breathed. At night, with the fire burning within, it glowed.
The tensile roof form runs through every structure on this site: clubhouse, lounge pavilions, mosque, stable and car park canopies. These fabric roofs are warmly lit against the deep blue of the desert night sky. There, the guests experience what the Bedouin understood long before luxury was a category: that the most generous shelter is the one that keeps the sky close and the fire near.
The Bedouin tent was always divided into three zones: the kitchen, the family quarters and the majlis (the place of sitting) where guests were received around an open hearth. The fire was the social centre of the tent: the thing that determined where people faced, how long they stayed and what kind of conversation was possible. To gather around a fire in Arabic culture was to enter a social contract of hospitality.
Every private suite has its own outdoor world beneath a personal tensile canopy. By day, it is a shaded terrace with a pool. By night, the focus shifts to a circular sunken fire pit at the centre of the deck, seating wrapped around it on all sides. The arrangement is a private majlis under a private tent.
The Arabian horse has been a companion in this culture for four thousand years, honoured in poetry, in warfare and in daily life. The stable is designed to reflect that. While a stable is usually a building you pass through on the way to the horse, this one asks you to stop.
Along the interior walls, terracotta screens punched with geometric patterns cast shifting light across the floor, much like the carved screens of traditional Saudi architecture filter sunlight in courtyards and prayer halls. The dividing walls between stalls curve upward in dune-like profiles, so the shape of the desert finds its way inside.
This is a space that understands the Arabian horse not as an animal to be housed but as a subject worthy of considered architecture.
In desert culture, green is not ordinary. The oasis was the desert's most radical gesture of generosity. To find green in the sand was to find a life-giving blessing.
The golf course in this resort earns its place by contrast; it’s carved from the desert and bordered by date palms and sand that drifts to the very edge of the green. A tent-roofed lounge pavilion sits at the course's edge in the same architectural language as the rest of the site, offering shade as desert hospitality has always offered it.
In traditional Arab settlement, the mosque was never separate from daily life. It stood at the centre of the market, the neighbourhood and between houses.
The mosque’s form shares the same vocabulary as every other building on the site: a peaked tensile roof, perforated stone screens in Islamic geometric patterns and an earthen palette of sand and warm timber. The minaret is the one vertical element in a landscape of horizontals. Here, the architecture that shades a fairway, holds an evening gathering and shelters a horse also frames a moment of prayer.
This project is available to explore in full here:
