Dubai's Palazzo Versace to have air-con beach

Dubai's Palazzo Versace, the hotel named after the fashion house, is to create the world’s first refrigerated beach so that hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days, it was reported on Sunday.

The beach will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface where summer temperatures average 40C and can reach 50C, the UK's Sunday Times reported.

The hotel is part of the Culture Village development between Garhoud Bridge and the new Ras Al-Khor Bridge directly opposite Dubai Festival City and was originally slated for completion in June 2009.

The hotel's swimming pool will also be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach, the paper added.

It quoted Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace, as saying he believed it was possible to design a refrigerated beach and make it sustainable. "We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on," he said. "This is the kind of luxury that top people want."

Hyder Consulting, a British construction consultancy, is overseeing the engineering on the project, the paper said.

The 10-storey hotel will have 215 rooms, several with their own internal swimming pools, and 169 condominiums.

The cooling system will be controlled by thermostats linked to computers, the paper said.

The paper also quoted Rachel Noble, the campaigns officer at Tourism Concern, a group which promotes sustainable tourism, as saying that the carbon generated by such projects would contribute to climate change, whose worst effects would be felt by the poor.

"Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so that people can continue their destructive lifestyles.".

About 60 percent of Dubai’s power bill is for air-conditioning with each resident having a carbon footprint of more than 44 tonnes of CO2 a year, the paper claimed.