DESIGN TRAVEL · DUBAI
Reading time: 5 minIn 1995, a hotel on Miami’s South Beach quietly rewrote the rules of luxury. Ian Schrager and Philippe Starck’s Delano, with its billowing white curtains and indoor-outdoor lobby, effectively invented the lifestyle hotel. Then the name went quiet for years. Now it is back, and its comeback is here: Delano Dubai, on Bluewaters Island, a careful act of translation that carries a legendary design language from 1990s Miami to the Arabian Gulf.
Some hotel names are just names. Delano is a piece of design history. When Ian Schrager and Philippe Starck reinvented a 1947 Miami hotel as the Delano South Beach in 1995, they created something genuinely new: a lobby that behaved like a stage set, a run of white voile curtains breathing in the sea breeze, an indoor space that dissolved into the outdoors, and a mood of theatrical, sociable glamour that the entire boutique-hotel movement would spend the next thirty years imitating. Delano did not just open a hotel. It wrote a grammar.
So the arrival of Delano Dubai, which opened in December 2024 on Bluewaters Island, is a more significant moment than another luxury launch. This is the revival of a dormant icon, the brand’s big return under Ennismore, and the interest lies less in the fact of it than in the execution: how faithfully, and how freshly, a new team could carry that famous DNA across the world to the Gulf. On the evidence, they have understood exactly what they inherited.
Translating the Delano codes
The design is a collaboration between the Athens studio Elastic Architects, SA Consultants, La Bottega Interiors and YDesign, working with Ennismore’s in-house team, and its real achievement is one of translation rather than reinvention. The signatures that made the original famous are all here, evolved for a new setting.
It begins at the door. Guests arrive through a discreet entrance framed by lush, manicured greenery, a direct nod to South Beach’s signature hedge, before a veil of flowing white curtains draws them into a luminous, open-plan space. That curtain is not decoration. It is a quotation, the single most recognisable gesture of Starck’s original, reprised as a threshold between the city and the calm within. Inside, the scheme runs on the contrast that has always defined the brand: pristine “Delano white” walls set against dark, wide-board timber floors, with architectural lighting sculpting the textures and layers so the whole space feels luminous and grounded at once. At the heart of the lobby, a reflective art piece by Hussain Jamil plays on movement and fluidity, a contemporary full stop on a very well-read sentence.
Guest rooms: soft minimalism, and a green apple
The 251 rooms and suites, 84 of them suites, carry the same restraint into a more intimate register. The palette is monochrome, warmed and softened, and the rooms are designed to catch daylight so completely that they take their names from it, Rising Light and Waking Eclipse among them. White oak floors are layered with plush custom wool rugs, king beds sit within fluted headboards, and living areas are dressed in textured boucle, while private balconies frame either the gardens or the Gulf, and the ground-floor Breaking Waves Suites open onto their own pools steps from the sand.
The nicest touch is a piece of brand memory. Byredo amenities and Dyson hair dryers cover the expected luxuries, but beside them sits a beautifully crafted apple-shaped vessel offering a daily surprise, a witty update of the single green apple that Starck famously placed in every room at the original Delano. It is exactly the kind of detail that tells you the people behind this hotel know their own history, and are enjoying it.
The Delano Penthouse
At the top, occupying the entire seventh floor, the five-bedroom Delano Penthouse by La Bottega Interiors is the resort’s showpiece. A private lift opens onto a stately corridor lined with polished stone columns, leading through a sequence of living and entertaining spaces that includes a professional Bulthaup kitchen and a shaded terrace with its own bar and formal dining. The plan is cleverly zoned to separate family quarters from the entertainment spaces, so it flows for a party yet retreats for privacy, and the detailing is uncompromising: uninterrupted skyline and Gulf views, and Zebrano marble bathrooms with freestanding tubs carved from single blocks of stone. It is ultra-luxury designed with genuine rigour rather than mere expense.
A social destination by design
Delano was always as much about the scene as the stay, and Delano Dubai honours that with a collection of restaurants and bars conceived as much for atmosphere as for eating, several developed in collaboration with the Paris Society group. The reimagined Rose Bar, a Delano classic reborn, trades in rose-hued marble, tufted velvet banquettes and secluded corners built for intimate conversation. Blue Door reinvents the legendary Miami dining room within a garden-filled oasis that spills onto the Bluewaters sands. And Tutto Passa channels the relaxed glamour of the Amalfi Coast in sun-drenched rooms of bold patterned tableware, with a private dining space linked to the Rose Bar by a hidden passage, a lovely piece of theatre that keeps the old Delano sense of discovery alive.
The setting amplifies all of it. On Bluewaters, a short causeway from the mainland and in the orbit of Ain Dubai, Delano sits where the energy of the city meets the calm of the Gulf, a location engineered for exactly the sociable, see-and-be-seen glamour the brand has always traded on.
Final thoughts
Delano Dubai had a difficult brief, harder than a simple new opening. It had to revive one of the most influential names in modern hospitality without either embalming it or losing its thread. It succeeds because it treats the original not as a style to copy but as a language to speak: the hedge, the white curtain, the Delano white against dark timber, the green apple, the pull toward the social. Every one of those codes is present, and every one has been evolved rather than merely reproduced.
The result is a hotel that feels both deeply familiar to anyone who knows the story and entirely at home on its Gulf island. Three decades after Schrager and Starck taught the world that a lobby could be a stage, their idea has been handed to a new generation and a new city, and it still works. Delano Dubai is more than a landmark on Bluewaters. It is proof that a truly good design idea does not date, it just waits for the right moment to make its entrance again.
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