Interiors · Dubai
Reading time: 6 minIf Rialto is the Italian Riviera at night, all amber and cinema, Iliana is the Greek islands by day, all whitewash and light. The two restaurants sit inside the same building, Shaun Killa’s superyacht-shaped hotel, and between them, the yacht drops anchor at two different Mediterranean coasts. Iliana is the one where you stay all day.
The pleasure of Iliana is easiest to understand when you place it next to its neighbour.
Inside Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab, the resort designed by Shaun Killa to look like a superyacht gliding across the Dubai coast, two Mediterranean restaurants tell opposite stories. Rialto is the Italian Riviera after dark, cinematic and golden. Iliana is the Greek islands at midday, bright, breezy and washed in white. Same yacht, two coasts, opposite moods. And where Rialto pulls you inward into candlelit drama, Iliana throws the doors open to the sea. It is the venue where the yacht seems to moor for the whole day, and it is designed accordingly.
Because Iliana is not only a restaurant. It is a three-part destination: a coastal Greek dining room, a luxurious pool club for long sun-filled afternoons, and a rooftop, all strung along a prime stretch of beachfront with direct views of the Burj Al Arab. This is the Aegean brought to the Gulf and given room to breathe.
The material is light
The best Greek-island design is not really about white walls. It is about what white walls do to sunlight, and Iliana understands this completely.
The palette is deliberately pared back: whitewashed tones, muted sands and soft neutrals, the colours of the Cyclades, of Mykonos and Paros, chosen precisely because they take the fierce coastal light and soften it. Stone and plaster walls carry a tactile roughness straight out of Cycladic architecture, so that daylight does not simply hit the surfaces but sinks into them, shifting through the hours. Delicate accents of terracotta, olive and pale Aegean blue appear just often enough to place you by the sea without tipping into postcard cliché.
The plan is built to dissolve. Iliana unfolds like a coastal villa, open and airy, with expansive windows that blur the line between the dining room and the terrace so the sea breeze drifts through the whole space. Terraces sit under sail-like canopies, a nautical touch that quietly rhymes with the yacht it all sits inside, and stone paths and warm timber ground the lightness with texture. Where Rialto was designed for the drama of night, Iliana is designed for the generosity of day. Light is its main material, and the whole room is a device for handling it beautifully.
At night the register changes, gently. Instead of statement chandeliers, Iliana keeps to human-scale light: candles, warm recessed glow, sculptural fixtures that follow the organic lines of the space. Natural materials absorb sound rather than bounce it, so the room stays calm and private even when full. The day version and the night version are the same place, relaxed into a different hour.
The small, true things
Luxury of this quiet kind lives in details, and Iliana’s are chosen with real care.
The gestures that stay with you are the modest ones. Linen napkins fastened with komboloi, the Greek worry beads, a tiny, specific piece of Greek daily life placed on the table. Handcrafted ceramics and neutral stoneware, woven cane and rattan chairs, timber tables with the soft patina of natural fibre. None of it shouts. Together it does something more valuable than impress: it makes you feel welcomed into a home rather than processed through a hotel. Every table is angled towards the water, each seat a vantage point onto sea or sky, with enough space between them that conversation stays your own.
The food belongs to the same philosophy, and it is in good hands. Head Chef Andreas Gkipalis brings genuine Greek cooking to the room, built on fresh seafood, olive oil, herbs and Mediterranean directness, and plated with the same restraint that shapes the interior: clean, natural, composed. The muted ceramics and stoneware the food arrives on are an extension of the design rather than a break from it. Nothing on the table argues with anything else. The room, the light, the beads on the napkin and the fish on the plate are all telling one calm story.
Lightness as the luxury
It would be easy to undervalue a restaurant this relaxed, and that would be a mistake.
In a resort of many venues, each reaching for glamour or drama, Iliana’s contribution is lightness, and lightness is harder to achieve than spectacle. The original brief of Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab was to be a cultural destination as much as a hotel, giving each restaurant its own distinct world, and Iliana’s world is the most difficult kind to design: one that feels effortless, unforced, almost accidental in its ease. That “accidental” quality is of course the product of a great deal of deliberate work, in the palette, the light, the acoustics and the flow between inside and out.
The Greek islands here are not copied. They are reinterpreted through a contemporary Gulf lens, authentic in feeling rather than literal in reproduction. And set inside a superyacht on the edge of the Arabian Gulf, the fantasy holds together completely.
Frequently asked questions
What is Iliana? A Greek-Mediterranean venue at Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab in Dubai, opened in 2025. It is a three-part destination: a coastal restaurant, a pool club and a rooftop, on the resort’s beachfront with views of the Burj Al Arab.
What inspired the design? The Cycladic islands, Mykonos and Paros in particular. Whitewashed tones, sandy neutrals, stone and plaster walls, woven cane and sail-like canopies recreate the bright, pared-back elegance of the Aegean coast.
Who is the chef? Head Chef Andreas Gkipalis, who leads Iliana’s Greek coastal menu of fresh seafood, olive oil and herbs.
How does it relate to Rialto? Both are Mediterranean restaurants inside Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab. Rialto evokes the Italian Riviera in a dark, cinematic register, while Iliana evokes the bright, whitewashed Greek islands, two contrasting coasts within the same superyacht-shaped hotel.
What are the standout details? Linen napkins fastened with komboloi (Greek worry beads), handcrafted ceramics, neutral stoneware, and a plan that opens completely to the sea breeze and the view.
Final thoughts
Iliana is the restaurant you would design if you wanted to spend a whole Mediterranean day in one place: bright and open at lunch, golden and calm by night, with a pool and a rooftop to fill the hours between. It brings the light of the Greek islands to the edge of the Gulf and handles it with genuine skill, in whitewashed plaster, woven cane and a string of worry beads on a folded napkin.
Set inside Shaun Killa’s superyacht alongside Rialto’s Italian Riviera, it completes a small, satisfying idea: one beautiful boat, moored at two Mediterranean coasts at once. In a city that so often equates luxury with volume, Iliana makes its case in the opposite direction, quietly, with light and ease and the confidence to leave things simple. That, in the end, is the harder and the finer thing to pull off.
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