Dubai: Surrounded by 300 deserted man-made islands, Dubai's newest real-estate wonder has all the amenities of a luxury hotel, plus views of the bottom of the sea.
The Floating Seahorse villas feature submerged bedrooms whose curtains open up to transplanted coral and the waters of the Persian Gulf. Wide-mouthed groupers and other fish dart past its over 15-centimeter-thick (6-inch-thick) acrylic windows.
But the Seahorses, part of an ambitious larger hotel development called The Heart of Europe, which will be built on reclaimed islands, have an even more grandiose-sounding aim.
They want to save The World, as the long-stalled Earth-shaped island project off the Dubai coast is called, by providing a major development that jumpstarts building on its other sandy islands.
"We wanted to be the first one. We always knew it's a risk and a chance," said Josef Kleindienst, the chairman of Kleindienst Group, which is building the Floating Seahorses and the Heart of Europe.
He added, "The World has started to move."
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