Twenty years after a converted car park on Great Eastern Street changed what a hotel lobby could be, The Hoxton has confirmed its first address in the Middle East. Ennismore has signed an agreement with Dubai developer Select Group to open The Hoxton Dubai Media City – the brand’s first hotel in the UAE and its introduction to the wider MENA region. The signing follows a run of momentum in Asia Pacific, with The Hoxton Bengaluru City and The Hoxton Melbourne both recently added to the pipeline.
The neighbourhood
The location is a considered one. Dubai Media City sits in the emirate’s innovation corridor, a district of media companies, production studios and digital businesses, with Dubai Marina, Palm Jumeirah and Jumeirah Lakes Towers on its doorstep. For a brand that has always chosen its neighbourhoods carefully – Shoreditch, Williamsburg, Vienna’s third district – it is the closest thing Dubai has to home turf: a working creative quarter rather than a resort strip. The stated ambition is to give the city’s growing community of artists, entrepreneurs and founders a place to meet, collaborate and trade ideas.
The building and rooms
True to form, this is a conversion rather than a new build. The Hoxton has made a habit of finding character in unloved architecture – the original Shoreditch hotel rose from a car park; Vienna occupies Carl Appel’s 1950s headquarters for the Austrian Economic Chambers; Edinburgh stitched together eleven Georgian townhouses. In Dubai, the brand takes on an existing Media City building, comprehensively reimagined in a multimillion-dirham redevelopment. Interiors across all 230 rooms come from AIME Studios, Ennismore’s in-house design team, working to the house formula: warm, residential spaces layered with detail and personality, this time drawing on Media City’s shifting, self-reinventing character.
Food and drink
The restaurants and bars come from Paris Society, the group behind several of Dubai’s most in-demand restaurants and nightspots, with four concepts confirmed. Two are entirely new. Onaka is a Japanese sushi hand-roll bar created in exclusive collaboration with Moïse Sfez, the award-winning French restaurateur behind Homer Lobster, who has made Dubai his base. Bleachers is a social sports bar built for watching live fixtures over classic sports-bar cooking, pitched somewhere between entertainment and dinner.
They are joined by Il Bambini Club, Paris Society’s classic Italian trattoria – warm room, lively bar, open kitchen – with existing locations in London, Paris and Cape Town, and Tope, The Hoxton’s signature rooftop, which has built a following in Barcelona, Portland and Brussels for its Mexican-inspired food and forthright cocktails. As at every Hoxton, the lobby stays at the centre of things: comforting classics alongside a cultural programme of local talent, pop-ups and creative events.
The wellness club
The headline, though, is the wellness club: the first of its kind for The Hoxton anywhere in the world, and a defining element of the project. Conceived as a social destination in its own right, open to hotel guests and Dubai residents alike, it is designed around community rather than solitary training. Inside: an expansive training floor, movement and aerobic studios, spa treatment rooms, contrast-therapy facilities and a dedicated members’ lounge, all finished in the brand’s residential style. Beaum, the club’s own healthy café concept, completes the picture. It is a significant move for a brand that has historically kept wellness to a rooftop pool, and a clear read on where Dubai’s social life is heading.
“We have long believed that The Hoxton could bring something new and distinctive to this creatively charged region,” said Louis Abboud, Ennismore’s Group Chief Development Officer, calling the property “a new flagship destination for Ennismore in the region”. For Select Group CEO Israr Liaqat, the wellness club extends a philosophy the developer applies across its residential work, where wellbeing has been a fixture from the start.
The bigger picture
The Hoxton now counts 19 hotels across the UK, Europe and the US, with openings ahead in Melbourne, Oslo, Nashville, Mexico City and Bengaluru. For Ennismore, Dubai Media City deepens one of its fastest-growing markets: more than 70 hotels and resorts across the Middle East, Türkiye and North Africa, representing over 23,000 rooms, including Delano Dubai, Our Habitas AlUla, Mondrian Doha, Aliée Istanbul, 25hours Hotel One Central and SO/ Ras Al Khaimah. The regional pipeline adds Mondrian Abu Dhabi, Rixos Dubai Islands, SLS Jeddah and Mama Shelter Cape Town.
No opening date has been confirmed. We’ll be watching this one closely.
Dubai-based Isabella Craddock is the founder of Near+Far, a founding Academy Chair for The World’s 50 Best Hotels, former Condé Nast Traveller editor and a hotel-obsessed, design-devoted travel planner—for friends, loved ones, and readers alike.
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