Raffles Doha is one of the world’s weirdest, most improbable buildings. That’s it in the picture – a five-star hotel incorporated in one prong of the incomplete circle that is the 40-storey Katara Towers in Lusail City (the Fairmont Doha is in the other prong), on land reclaimed from both desert and sea. It’s an architect’s/despot’s fantasy turned reality. The bonkers design is meant to echo Qatar’s national emblem of crossed scimitars, and I’d love to see the back of the envelope upon which it was first sketched.
It’s far, far beyond my miserable hack’s pay grade, but invited as a guest I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t resist. The tone was set at Doha’s Hamad International Airport (Skytrax Airport of the Year 2021, 2022, 2024), where I was met by a chauffeur-driven gold Bentley. I’d never set foot in a Bentley before, let alone a gold one, but in Doha, it seems, it’s the only way to travel.
There’s nothing so banal as a check-in desk at Raffles Doha, and nothing so banal as individual bedrooms. It’s suites only, of which there are 132, and I was ushered direct to mine on the 27th floor, with formalities conducted over a glass of champagne. Comprising a vast living room (with sofas, armchairs, desk, six-seater dining table, balcony and cinema screen TV), bedroom, walk-in wardrobe, private mirror-lined bar, enormous bathroom and floor to ceiling windows all round, my new home was larger than the entire ground floor at 22 Old Queen Street and with better views. Oh, and at roughly £850 a night, my Gulf Signature Suite came with my own butler, Nerissa.
It took Nerissa almost an hour to explain the ‘room management and multisensory system via in-suite tablet’, the scent diffuser with its choice of five different aromas, the iPad and surround-sound music system, the tea and coffee machines, the bar, the four-jet shower, the loo with heated, self-raising seat and that gargantuan TV which somehow connected to my phone. I tried to follow instructions but failed. Not because I couldn’t work out how to use anything (I couldn’t), but because I couldn’t work out what half the things were meant to do.
Nerissa gave up after I opened the blinds in the bathroom for the third time while trying to turn the lights off in the bar and made the loo flush while resetting the water temperature. I later had to page her to come to escort me downstairs as I couldn’t make the lift work. There was just too much impenetrable tech.
Nerissa gave up after I opened the blinds in the bathroom for the third time while trying to turn the lights off in the bar and made the loo flush while resetting the water temperature
The world’s largest kaleidoscope with its 974 winking screens (Qatar’s dialling code is 974) towers over the grand marble lobby and, despite the hotel being nearly full, I barely saw another person. I had a cracking dinner at the hotel’s Italian restaurant, Alba, decent breakfasts at l’Artisan and a jolly cuppa in the Malaki tea lounge. My favourite spot, though, was the Blue Cigar library bar with its 6,500 books and its ‘book sommelier’, who came and read to me as I necked a couple of cocktails and puffed on a fine cigar.
I glimpsed a couple of Qataris who, notoriously, are a minority in their own country, comprising barely 10 per cent of the population. All the staff are foreign. Nerissa is South African, and I met a Ugandan sommelier, a Nepalese chef, a Moroccan deputy manager, a Romanian bartender, a Kenyan doorman, a Sri Lankan chauffeur, a Bangladeshi waiter, a Rwandan waitress and a Spanish maître d’. There are 82 different nationalities on the staff.
There was a spa, a 44-seater cinema, a kids’ club, a pool and much else besides. Ridiculously luxurious and lacking in nothing, Raffles Doha’s pampering embrace was hard to escape (not least given my difficulties with the lift) – but I felt I owed it to myself to get out and explore.
I had a whistlestop tour of Doha Old Port, the fish market and the restored but still atmospheric Souq Waqif, with its spice merchants, jewellery stalls, carpet sellers, food stands and, famously, its falcon shop and falcon hospital. I even made it to the desert and the fabled Inland Sea, rode a knackered old camel, flew a falcon and sand-boarded down a dune. Well, halfway down before I fell off.
What will bring me back to Doha, though, is neither desert nor Raffles. It’s the majestic Museum of Islamic Art. That alone was worth the trip. Designed by I.M. Pei – he of Louvre Pyramid fame – it sits on a specially created peninsula off Doha’s Corniche, and, from a distance, its Cubist exterior is said to look like the head of a woman wearing a niqab. With books, jewellery, glass, pottery, tiles, carpets, armour, swords and silks from the 7th to the 21st centuries, all beautifully laid out and explained, there is so much to feast on and learn and I was utterly entranced. It’s one of the great museums of the world and I can’t wait to go back.
Sadly, cost and technophobia mean a return to Raffles Doha, gloriously, seductively, self-indulgently swish though it is, is a tad less likely.
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