What could be more disastrous for holiday posing than hot sand? You do your best to catch eyes as you massage in your suncream. You shake your hair as you slowly lift yourself off your lounger for a swim. But then your feet touch down on what feels like hot embers and you find yourself doing an embarrassing fast hop down to the water, trying not to mouth 'Ow, ow, ow' all the way.
Versace's latest venture in the luxury hotel market will put paid to this unsightly hotfooting. Guests at the Palazzo Versace Dubai will be able to step on to their private, man-made beach and have their feet protected by temperature-controlled sand.
'The temperature the whole year will be 22 degrees [Celsius],' says Soheil Adedian, joint managing director of Sunland Group Limited, the property developer which previously partnered Versace for its first hotel on Australia's Gold Coast in 2000. Details about how they will achieve this latest goal on the Gulf coast, where summer temperatures can reach 50C, have yet to be released.
'It sounds terribly ambitious but it's not impossible,' says Ian Clarke of CAL Controls Ltd, a UK company specialising in industrial temperature control. 'To make it work, they'd need to tap into a cool resource - the sea or underground water - and then control the flow beneath the sand.'
But in a month when the travel industry has been awash with green issues, how does this sit with environmentalists? 'If they use natural resources, this may not be as horrific as it sounds,' says Michael Mason of Climate Care, the Oxford-based organisation which recently teamed up with British Airways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. 'However, it still seems like an ostrich-like approach to the future. We should be concentrating on using energy for things we actually need.'
Work on the £385 million Palazzo Versace begins next year, with the opening in 2008. There will be 215 suites and 204 villas, all heavily branded by Versace. The hotel will also include a recording studio in a bid to attract musicians on retreat. Last month Michael Jackson was spotted at Dubai's current number one hotel, the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab.
