Creeping past a line of terracotta-coloured palaces in a Riyadh suburb, my car slowed at a building styled on the White House and turned a sharp right. In a nearby side street, dark blue-mirrored sliding doors guarded the privacy of my destination: The Luthan, Saudi Arabia’s first women-only hotel.
Owned by a group of Saudi princesses and businesswomen, the hotel is a pioneer in the Middle East, but part of a wider global trend for hotels that ban men, either completely or from specific floors – women can now choose female-only accommodation in cities from Copenhagen to Singapore and Vancouver. In most cases the idea has come from marketing departments who believe women appreciate different decor and amenities than men, but in Saudi Arabia there are more concrete advantages for female guests.
The Luthan – whose name means “sanctuary” in Arabic – opened in 2008, the year the Saudi kingdom first permitted women to stay in hotels without a male guardian, and offers an environment where locals and foreign visitors can walk around freely without the abaya, a black robe teamed with a headscarf. Later this year the 25-room hotel – an independent – will face competition from a heavyweight international rival when Riyadh’s five-star Four Seasons opens a female-only floor (the 50th) as part of a $40m redevelopment, with rooms costing more than double the price of those at the Luthan. It is a major development in a fledgling market that offers women rare communal space to relax in a country with tight restrictions on their movement and behaviour.