Posted by 
Versace, the renowned fashion house, is to create the world’s first refrigerated beach so that hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days.
The beach will be next to the the new Palazzo Versace hotel which is being built in Dubai where summer temperatures average 40C and can reach 50C.
The beach will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface.
The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach.
Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace, said he believed it is possible to design a refrigerated beach and make it sustainable. “We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,” he said. “This is the kind of luxury that top people want.”
Hyder Consulting, a British construction consultancy, is overseeing the engineering on the project. The hotel will be marketed strongly in the UK where Dubai is a popular tourist destination, attracting about 800,000 Britons a year.
Abedian’s firm began its association with Versace a decade ago with the idea of creating the first chain of luxury fashion-branded lifestyle resorts.
The first Palazzo Versace is already operating on Australia’s Gold Coast – where Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, the actors, have stayed – and the Dubai hotel will be the second when it opens late next year or early 2010. The 10-storey hotel will have 213 rooms, several with their own internal swimming pools, plus 169 apartments. Fifteen more such hotels are planned.
Competition to serve the world’s rich is getting intense, especially in Dubai. The city already boasts the world’s first seven-star hotel, the Burj Al Arab, while Armani, a competitor with Versace, is building a similarly branded Dubai hotel.
The refrigerated beach is designed to give Versace the edge in this battle of luxury lifestyles. The system will be controlled by thermostats linked to computers.
Versace’s plans have shocked environmentalists. Rachel Noble, the campaigns officer at Tourism Concern, which promotes sustainable tourism, said that the carbon generated by such projects would contribute to climate change, whose worst effects would be felt by the poor.
“Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so that people can continue their destructive lifestyles,” she said.
Aided by cheap oil and gas, Middle Eastern nations have poured enormous resources into controlling temperature. About 60% of Dubai’s huge power bill is for air-conditioning; each person living there has a carbon footprint of more than 44 tons of CO2 a year.
Source: Times Online
wow! i can’t believe it! refridgerated beach??! I have to be there to see it!
CHUMPMAN, YOU are an idiot.
I will fight you right now.
Bring it…queer.
lame
booooooooooooooooring
I wish I could have just a small amount of the money it is going to cost. I have a hard time just keeping my home cool in the summer. If Versace’ would like to have a charity write-off, I’ll be happy to ablige him.
I think something like this is already done in Mecca for the pilgrims.
wtf… a refrigerated beach?
that’s sick
You can’t be serious. What is the point in going to the beach. Some people have more money than sense.
that is total wierd i cant beileve that
Why has everyone taken their views to listening to the governmental hype that is global warming or “now more politically correct” climate change. The climate has been changing for thousands of years and will continue to change. Hmmm, let’s see… Let’s waste more money on electric cars to increase production (which increases the carbon footprint size) and then find places to “discard” the “used up” batteries (in landfills which will increase the carbon footprint size) and drive on roads that will not be kept up because of the lack of fuel consumption tax which currently pays for the roads. Gasoline burns up and goes into the atmosphere. Batteries are corrosive, are not biodegradable, and while they are sitting in the landfill and start leaking, this can cause even more harmful air. The broken batteries will leak and seep into our groundwater. It just irks me that people are so blind to the reality that they listen and believe everything that the media tells them. To those I say “enjoy reading everything that the internet has to offer because everything on the internet is a fact”
Global force is right and for anyone who lives in Dubai knows that Dubai is has started massive projects on sustainability and they don’t have a lot of oil it’s said that the limited oil in Dubai will finish in 2015 but it’s neighbour abu dhabi the capital of UAE has lots of oil but Dubai does have lots if money from tourists and investors and they’re working more and more on sustainability and in the summer the temperature reaches 50 degrees Celsius which is extremely hot not livable so the tourists don’t get dissappointed they’ve built this imagine youre a tourist who came in the summer and wanted go to the beach and finds out it’s too hot to walk on the sand guess what you’re air ticket has just gotten wasted but because of this refrigerated beach people can now go to the beach in the extreme summer of Dubai . This technique is applied in lots of places in the world but not on beaches I don’t know why do people make such a big deal about it . Side note to Versace I would be delighted if you send me a few million dollars
Farce…. get a job you freak. change your underwear and leave the world alone..
I boo hop so what our carbon levels are on the rise what else is new. I say one thing to you politically correct folks; the evoirment always changes. I thought the 60’s was the hippie era. So you can take your carbon footprint problem and shove it. In the last century the temperature has rose what 1.6 degrees that mean by the time it is a real threat i’ll be dead(or should I say deceased). What ya’ll (yep I said ya’ll well woopie doo i’m southern so get over it) need to worry about is our corrupt government of the USA. Ya’ll chew on that for a while.