Sleeping Inside a Secret: A Night at XVA Art Hotel

Most of Dubai is built to be seen from far away. XVA Art Hotel is the opposite. It sits down a lane so narrow you can walk past the door twice before you notice it.

The lane is in Al Fahidi, the oldest part of the city. It sits right by the water, on the old inlet that Dubai first grew up around, where small wooden boats still carry people from one side to the other.

Persian traders settled here more than a century ago and built low stone houses along a maze of alleyways. Most of it is still standing. Turn in off the main road and the traffic noise fades after a few steps, and the passages get cool and shaded and quiet.

The hotel used to be a family home. It belonged to the Seddiqis, the family who brought Rolex to Dubai, until a gallerist named Mona Hauser took it over in 2003 and turned it into a hotel, café and art gallery all at once.

It still feels like a home. Not a showroom, more like staying the night at a friend's old family house.

There are fifteen rooms, and a different artist designed each one, so no two look the same. One is deep blue with calligraphy on the walls. Another is pale, with carved wooden screens that let the sunlight fall across the floor in patterns.

Some are modern and bright. Others keep the old wood and the smell of incense. You don't really book a room, you pick the one you want to wake up in.

The building stays cool the old way. The ceilings are high, which keeps the heat off you, and there are tall towers on the roof that catch the wind and cool the rooms below, the way houses here did before air conditioning.

The walls are thick, so once the sun goes down the rooms go quiet. You sleep well here.

There are no corridors. Step out of your room and you're outside, with the warm stone walls around you.

XVA has three courtyards, all shaded, and each one feels different. One is full of plants and good for a slow morning with coffee. One is more open and fills with candlelight at night. The third is the quiet one, good for sitting and doing nothing for an afternoon.

The café is out in these courtyards, and the people who love it would rather keep it to themselves. The food is all vegetarian, based on Middle Eastern cooking, and nothing about it is rushed.

Mornings start with a local breakfast of homemade labneh and warm flatbread, then the day moves on to small sharing plates, salads and a cold mint lemonade that makes the heat easier to deal with. Nobody around you seems to know what time it is, which is kind of the point.

If you want to take something home, the small boutique by the entrance sells jewellery, clothes and homeware made by local artisans. The pieces have small imperfections that tell you a person made them.

The XVA Gallery runs through the whole place and shows work by artists from around the region. The art isn't only in the gallery. It's in the café, in the courtyards, on the walls of the rooms, so after a day or two you stop going to look at it and just get used to having it around.

XVA isn't trying to compete with the rest of Dubai, and it doesn't need to. It gives you something the big shiny parts of the city can't: the feeling of finding a place the city kept quiet, and being let in anyway.