ME Dubai

ME Dubai is inside the Opus, Zaha Hadid’s building in the Burj Khalifa district, and the architecture is not a backdrop here but the reason to book. The atrium curves and opens overhead, sightlines change as you cross the floor, and the whole thing behaves less like a hotel than like a piece of sculpture with rooms in it.

Those rooms carry the same geometry down to the scale of a headboard, in two quite different moods. Roka brings robata cooking into the middle of it, and there is a rooftop pool for the hours when the building has been admired enough. In a city with no shortage of spectacle, this is the address where the spectacle is indoors.

Living inside the Opus

The building is the point. Zaha Hadid’s language of curves, open volumes and shifting perspectives carries from the exterior into the public rooms, so crossing the atrium is an event rather than a transition. The setting is contemporary Dubai at its most vertical, where architecture counts as a local sport and this is one of the more articulate entries. Guests who care about design get more from a stay here than the photographs suggest.

Desert or after dark

The rooms come in two moods: one built on the warm tones of the desert, the other on the darker palette of the city at night. Curved headboards and shaped furniture bring the building’s geometry down to a domestic scale, so the design carries on past the door. The difference between the two is atmosphere more than layout, which makes the room something to choose and not simply accept.

Roka, then the roof

Roka handles robata, grilling over charcoal in the Japanese manner, and it is the reservation that shapes an evening here. The MAINE Land Brasserie is the looser, later option. Above them the rooftop pool turns the city into a horizon, and the spa closes the day down properly. Dubai encourages the accumulation of plans, and this hotel is unusual in being worth cancelling one for.