The good part about the location is that, even though the hotel is on a sliver of land perpendicular to the shore, the developers finally got permission for the hotel to utilize the actual beach and will feature a beach club as part of the overall offering. Due to the former emir's residence being located a few blocks down the coast and an adjacent neighborhood inhabited by some of Kuwait's most powerful families, security reasons closed the area off with the exception of the Radisson Blu and Palms hotels next door being able to use the beach, but Arabella never did... which leads to the next point: the hotel stands on a site that was virtually a mirror image of the tiered/domed structure right across from it, both of which were built in the early 2010s and housed a collection of local and internationally branded restaurants. The developers tore down one half to replace it with the hotel a few years ago, and what we see now is the end result. There are still restaurants and coffee shops in the existing building, and they'll complement the all-day dining venue, lobby lounge and pool bar in the Arabella Beach Hotel.

One of my friends went on a site tour, and made a few key observations:

• The pool on the ground level in the renderings will be part of a gym operated by a third party; hotel guests will have access to the rooftop pool
• The rooftop pool is part of a spacious overall deck, but it won't be ready for a few months
• When the hotel was initially announced, the renderings showed four stars [you can see it in the first rendering upthread]; the website mentioned four as well when it went online, but it was changed to five and the hotel has been repositioned as a five-star property
• I've been told that the basic rooms are nice, but boring; the seafront suites are nice, but the overall footprints are compact and the finishings are decent but not necessarily at the five-star level [which is what I was afraid of when the hotel switched from four to five stars]

In any case, this an intriguing property and one I'll keep an eye on. I'll check it out when it opens next month, in December or January; I made a reservation for mid-January since I'll be out of Kuwait from the end of December until then, but will move the booking forward if the opening date shifts that way.

khabah