Shaping Diriyah Through Design

Aedas unveiled its role in shaping Diriyah’s emergence as one of the world’s most culturally significant luxury destinations in Riyadh, through the design of four flagship hospitality developments delivered in collaboration with Diriyah Company: The Oberoi Wadi Safar, Four Seasons Diriyah, Capella Diriyah, and Orient Express Diriyah.

Set within Diriyah, the historic “City of Earth” and home to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of At-Turaif, these projects form part of a broader vision to transform the area into a global cultural capital that fuses Najdi identity with contemporary lifestyle, hospitality, and urban vitality. Drawing deeply from the region’s landscapes, traditions, and architectural intelligence, Aedas approaches each project as a distinct narrative rooted in place, integrating enduring Najdi elements such as the falaj, courtyards, walls, and sikkas to shape planning, massing, movement, and experience.

This philosophy is expressed uniquely across the portfolio: The Oberoi Wadi Safar unfolds as an ultra-luxury sanctuary embedded within the agricultural heritage of Wadi Safar, where palm groves, water systems, private courtyards, and low-lying villas are carefully woven into the terrain to create seclusion and a continuous dialogue with the land.

Four Seasons Hotel Diriyah

The Four Seasons Diriyah rises along the Wadi Hanifah escarpment as a refined urban resort, its 150 keys organised into clustered traditional houses that step with the landscape, linked by shaded pathways, courtyards, and grand colonnades that echo the spatial dignity of historic Najdi palaces,

Capella Diriyah interprets the defensive fortress typology of Al Hisan through a contemporary lens, using courtyards, sunken wells, stepped voids, and a spatial hierarchy inspired by At-Turaif to guide guests from public to private realms with cultural clarity and modern elegance.

Capella Diriyah

Orient Express Diriyah, the brand’s first hotel in the region, anchors a prominent luxury retail frontage with an 86-key destination structured around three landscaped courtyards and a souq-inspired circulation spine, seamlessly integrating pedestrian life, activated F&B, and urban storytelling into the surrounding masterplan.

Orient Express Diriyah

As Ignacio Gomez, Global Design Principal at Aedas, said, “Understanding the beauty and ingenuity of Najdi architecture is not about replicating its motifs or aesthetics, but about respecting the intelligence behind its typological solutions, its massing, materiality, and sense of place shaped by time and culture. This understanding guides how we place human scale at the heart of our developments. Najd is, above all, about people.”

Together, these projects demonstrate how Aedas translates heritage into experience rather than imitation, crafting architecture that is both culturally grounded and globally resonant, while continuing to contribute additional assets across Diriyah’s wider masterplan.

Feature Image: The Oberoi Wadi Safar