Lost in luxury

The new Atlantis is "so ludicrous, it's almost heroic", says Stephen Bleach in the Sunday Times. Built on the tip of the Palm Jumeirah, a three-mile-long, manmade island off the coast of Dubai, this 1,539-room mega-resort is a "boggling" feat of engineering, with a £750m price tag. Go inside and it "gets odder still", with glass sculptures "like cascading multicoloured spaghetti", garish murals and acres of "swirly carpet".

The maze of corridors and avenues form perhaps "the most expensive design identity-crisis in history", with shades of 1980s Dallas competing with cutting-edge contemporary styles. Standard rooms are big and reassuringly bland, while the 'Lost Chambers' suites have windows looking out underwater to a lagoon teeming with fish. The hotel's cavernous underwater complex is the "star attraction": staff "gravely" assure you that you are looking upon Plato's lost city of Atlantis – but as it was all built only this century, "you don't have to be a Time Team presenter to know that this doesn't quite add up". Opens September 2008.

Kuoni (01306 747 002) has three nights in October from £879pp. ·