Political unrest and rebellion is sweeping through the Middle East. Yet Dubai remains hopeful that it can regain its place near the top of the luxury holiday home sector.
There are two key reasons for this confidence. The emirate has remained relatively stable to date, despite the turmoil elsewhere in the region; Dubai is even benefiting from the upheaval and rioting in Bahrain. Designer labels are another — not only attached to the handbags and watches in the miles of shopping malls, but also to property.
As you drive from the airport, you see numerous half-finished construction projects that have been put on hold during the financial crisis. But the developers behind the Armani and Versace schemes remain convinced that an upmarket global brand has pulling power, whatever the geopolitical climate. There may be something in this. As many as 70 per cent of the 169 apartments in the Palazzo Versace Dubai have already sold, though we should mention that a few off-plan purchasers tried to pull out, but were prevented from doing so by the courts.
Anyone wishing to buy into the development today can benefit from significantly reduced — but still considerable — prices, ranging from 8.5 million dirhams (£1.4 million) for a two-bedroom apartment, to more than 44 million dirhams (£7.4 million) for a six-bedroom penthouse. There are 144 apartments in the Armani scheme, a joint venture with Emaar Properties, a Dubai business, but prices remain confidential.
The Palazzo Versace, a detached, neoclassical building, is a partnership between the Australian developer Sunland Group and the Italian high-glamour fashion house.
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Neoclassicism is as big in Dubai as in Las Vegas. There are white columns from the moment you walk through customs. By the time you reach baggage reclaim there is a vast avenue of columns. The Versace development, launched in 2008, stands on Dubai Creek, an area of reclaimed waterway currently occupied by the Park Hyatt Hotel, but little else.
The location is intended to be the site of a Culture Village. There is already a sign on the road pointing the way to this attraction, even though investment in the scheme has stalled.
Visiting the show apartment — modelled on the late Gianni Versace’s villa in Miami, on the doorstep of which he was murdered in 1997 — is something of a surreal experience. The flat is bedecked with Renaissance-style cartoons and an awful lot of turquoise silk, yet it is set within a shell of a building, in a district with insufficient plumbing or electricity.
The development was going to feature a refrigerated beach (Dubai’s indoor ski slope and mock-Alpine village are kept permanently refrigerated). But the beach has been scrapped after environmental protest, and Soheil Abedian, chief executive of the Sunland Group, maintains that he now questions the blind continuation of Dubai’s outmoded “bigger, better, taller, richer” culture.
But even though there will be no refrigerated beach, vintage Versace dresses will be on show in the lobby, which will be decorated in the tropical print of the ultra-revealing dress worn by Jennifer Lopez to the Grammy Awards in 2000.
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Some of the building’s other interior features are beautiful for their craftsmanship: the floor mosaics were handmade by the same company that decorated Dubai’s biggest mosque.
However, this sort of decorative touch is notably absent from the walls of the Armani properties within the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, which have been left blank on the instruction of Mr Armani, in adherence to the principles of feng shui.
Here the walls are made of polished pumice and form sliding screens in the Japanese tradition of multifunctional spaces. This may sound lovely, but the aesthetic is so bland that it is almost mind-numbing, and one feels institutionalised walking down the strangely-lit greige corridors to the lift that shoots up 18 metres per second.