19 May 2005
Versace to open luxury hotel in Dubai
- By AFP
Dubai, May 18: Fashionistas are likely to be treading a path soon to Dubai, the desert leisure hub where the Versace fashion house is opening a glamorous new hotel — complete with its own temperature-controlled beach.
The 600-700 million dollar Palazzo Versace is set to open in 2008 as a joint venture between the fashion group, Australian property developer Sunland Group Ltd and a Dubai-based investment firm, company officials said on Wednesday.
“It’s a palace,” said Soheil Abedian, joint managing director of Sunland, which opened another Versace hotel in Australia’s Gold Coast in 2000 and has plans for similar projects in Moscow and Shanghai.
“We’ll have our own man-made beach, where the temperature the whole year will be 22 º Celsius in a country where temperatures can exceed 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in the summer.”
He did not, however, explain how the hotel would succeed in keeping the beach temperatures down to allow guests to brave the scorching heat in the wealthy Gulf state.
The hotel will be decorated and furnished with Versace items, Mr Abedian said at a press conference with Gianni Versace SpA president Santo Versace — brother of founder Gianni Versace who was gunned down in 1997. Construction is due to start at the end of the year or early next year in a coastal area of Dubai, with the official opening scheduled for 2008.
The hotel will be built by Emirates Sunland Group, a joint venture between Sunland and the Emirates International Holding company made up of Gulf investors. The project is among a raft of pioneering schemes launched by Dubai, which hopes to become the leisure hub of West Asia and one of the world’s top tourism destinations.
Dubai, with a population of 1.2 million including over a million foreigners, hosted 5.4 million visitors last year and plans to receive about 15 million a year from 2010.