sails hotel
doha, qatar
2015
Sails hotel commands a prime waterfront location.
Nestled between sea and land, the project is a creative integration of three segregated but symbiotically related programs: a five-star hotel, a sailing club, and a wooden ships workshop.
The design echoes culturally specific naval aesthetics and design efficiency through Qatar’s history.
Clean, simple elongated volumes stretch, shift and subtly overlap to create multiple visual and physical connections with the waterfront and the immediate urban context. The outcome is a seamless and flowing transition between boat storage halls, ships workshops, administrative and museum facilities, hotel public amenities, and lavish hospitality volumes. In both built form and open landscapes, a sense of unity and continuity is meticulously crafted while preserving and enhancing the inherent qualities and, more notably, the crucial privacy of each of the components.
The aim here is to a forward-looking sustainable environment that enhances open-air entertainment in season and stretches the public areas seamlessly to the water.
This is achieved through a xeriscaped landscaping strategy applied on the hotel’s lush gardens and the project’s roofs, the fifth façade. Native planting and ground cover with high resilience to water shortages is introduced. The resulting reduction in water consumption, promotion of biodiversity, and increase in the buildings’ thermal mass are key components of the team’s holistic design approach that prioritizes passive sustainability measures throughout.
Areas:
Hotel 45 400 m²
Ship workshop: 9 000 m²
Ship construction yard: 3 000 m²
architecture: nabil gholam architects
3D images: nabil gholam architects