The story

Al-Hada sits in the Sarawat mountains above Taif — cool, breezy, deeply Hijazi. The brief was a wellness retreat that didn't feel imported. No glass-box hotel resort, no concept lifted from Bali. Something that read as inevitably Saudi the moment a visitor stepped out of the lift.

We led with the language of traditional Hijazi domestic architecture — the courtyard, the mashrabiya, the stratified envelope — and pulled it through a modern wellness sequencing brief. Visitors move from arrival through cleansing through treatment through rest along an axis that mirrors the historical pilgrimage retreat. Sustainability is baked into the envelope strategy: passive cooling from courtyard convection, mashrabiya screens for solar gain control, landscape-led runoff capture for irrigation.