Aqaba Hotel

Aqaba Hotel is conceived around the idea of transforming the roof into a fifth façade—a continuous landscaped surface that introduces gardens and outdoor spaces into a compact urban site.

Working with the existing structural grid, the building shifts vertically and horizontally to create a series of terraces across its upper levels. These landscaped spaces extend the hotel rooms and suites outdoors while providing shared areas for guests. Openings, setbacks and cantilevered volumes are carefully positioned to frame views from multiple sides of the building and establish a stronger relationship with the surrounding landscape and the Aqaba coast.

Arrival takes place from the north, where guests descend into a partially embedded triple-height lobby. The lobby opens toward an outdoor garden through a broad landscaped stair, bringing natural light and vegetation deep into the building. The lower levels accommodate the lounge, ballroom, restaurants, bar and spa, while ground-floor dining spaces extend outward into public terraces.

Four room typologies are distributed throughout the hotel in response to the shifting architectural volumes. Rather than treating the accommodation floors as a repetitive stack, the changing geometry generates different spatial conditions, terraces and relationships with the exterior.

At roof level, a restaurant and swimming pool overlook Aqaba and its surrounding landscape. Light-colored stone, timber and integrated planting establish a restrained material palette suited to the climate and reinforce the relationship between architecture and landscape.

The project transforms the constraints of a compact site into its defining architectural idea: a hotel where built form and landscape merge vertically, extending the experience of the ground all the way to the roof.