Confidential Hotel and Barefoot Luxury Resort

Client

Baccarat

Year

2025

ARCHITECTURE

work completed while at HKS

The Challenge

To imagine a resort on an untouched Red Sea island that already held a profound sense of stillness. The challenge lay in protecting this purity while creating a destination of rare emotional depth.

Barefoot luxury is not an aesthetic. It is a feeling. A quiet confidence. A precise elegance distilled from simplicity and craft. This project demanded an architecture and landscape response that could honour Hijazi heritage, celebrate artisanal workmanship, and welcome guests into a world shaped by texture, rhythm and narrative rather than spectacle.

With a programme that spanned guestrooms, Manzils, branded residences, a yacht club hotel, gallery spaces, wellness sanctuaries and F&B, the ambition was to create a coherent journey across the island. Every space needed to belong to the landscape, not interrupt it. Every connection needed to feel effortless. And every moment had to hold the atmosphere of a place discovered, not constructed.

We were tasked with shaping a resort that feels as though it has always been here, carried by the breeze, the light, and the quiet spirit of the Red Sea.

View Results

work completed while at HKS

The Results

The resort unfolds as a low-slung tapestry of architecture, landscape and crafted detail, each gesture calibrated to preserve the soul of the island. Inspired by local Hijazi traditions and artisanal craft, the design moves with calm intention, grounding guests in a sense of belonging from the moment of arrival.

Eighty-two guestrooms and Manzils are composed as serene coastal sanctuaries, complemented by twelve private branded residences that echo the honesty of local materials and the softness of the natural palette. The yacht club hotel introduces an elegant maritime rhythm, framing views across the water and establishing the resort’s relationship to the sea.

Amenities become part of a larger emotional journey. Gallery spaces, four distinctive F&B outlets, and a state-of-the-art spa and wellness centre with fifteen treatment rooms create moments of pause and connection. A ballroom and meeting suite invite gatherings that feel intimate despite their scale. The beach club, set directly into the sand with its glass-edged pool touching the shoreline, becomes a place of pure exhale.

Landscape is the invisible narrator. Pathways, shade structures and planted courtyards guide guests through the resort with quiet clarity, converging in the Crystal Garden, the heart that binds amenities together in a natural flow of movement and discovery .

The result is a destination defined not by extravagance, but by emotion. A barefoot luxury resort where atmosphere lingers, memory endures, and the land remains the true author of the experience.