Bvlgari Resort Dubai

You do not arrive at this hotel so much as cross to it. The turn off Jumeira Beach Road puts you on a 300-metre bridge that takes about 2 minutes to cross, and at the end of it there is a gatehouse and then the island. Jumeira Bay is man-made and seahorse-shaped, and the resort has the whole seaward tip of it. What you see first is the thing everyone photographs: a long low building wrapped in a perforated white canopy that Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel drew to look like coral, which throws a dappled shadow across the terraces all day and glows from underneath at night. There is no tower. Nothing here is more than a few storeys, which in this city is a statement in itself. Behind you, 4 kilometres across the water, the entire skyline of Dubai stands up out of the haze with the Burj Khalifa in the middle of it — close enough to read, far enough to be scenery. Dubai International is 25 minutes away and Al Maktoum 45, and the parking is free and out of sight.

The rooms are Italian in a way that has nothing to do with ornament. Oak laid like a ship's deck, travertine and black granite, a woven headboard the width of the wall, a scarlet-bordered blanket folded across the bed, and then a wall of glass and a balcony behind the pierced coral screen. Every room and suite in the building has one, and it is built as a second living room, with a couch and a breakfast table on it. That is where the day ends. At 6 the light comes off the water low and flat, the screen's filigree throws its pattern across the floor, the towers on the far shore start switching on one at a time, and the sea between here and there goes from turquoise to pewter to black. The garden rooms offer a different stay: no balcony or city view, but a wall of glass that slides away onto a private walled garden with a cabana, and the beach a minute's walk past the hedge. That indoor-outdoor choice is the key one here.

The service here is short on ceremony and unusually concrete: check-in happens in your room rather than at a desk, somebody will unpack and repack your cases, there is a Berluti shoe shine, and a butler is on the floor round the clock. This is 101 rooms and 20 villas on an island, and the manner is quiet, Italian and slightly formal. The things arranged from here are worth knowing about because most of them are not hotel activities. Italy in the Glass is 45 minutes with a sommelier and 3 wines from 3 regions in Il Ristorante's private dining room. The Art of Mixology is run by the group's own bar director. There is a cigar lounge at the Yacht Clvb with a session on cutting and lighting. And the marina is a working one — 46 berths for boats from 10 to 40 metres, a travertine promenade lit by street lamps, dockhands on call round the clock, and a Dock and Dine arrangement that berths a registered boat free for 4 hours if you have come by water to eat. Beyond the bridge the resort runs its own Maserati out to the desert, to Abu Dhabi and to the old creek, and will put you in a helicopter over the city, from 10 minutes to an hour.