Montreval
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Montreval
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Below the escarpment, the Sabaia Sands
Twenty-nine tented suites, one fire, and no light after ten except the sky.
29 tented suites — From €1,150 a night
Sabaia is the only house in the collection built to be removed. Every structure sits on screw piles rather than foundations; every tent can be struck, and the site returned to sand, in eleven weeks. This was a condition of the lease from the Adeem families and it turned out to be the best design brief we have ever been given.
Twenty-nine tented suites are strung along the base of the escarpment, far enough apart that you cannot hear your neighbour and close enough that nobody has to walk more than four minutes to dinner. Each is canvas over a cedar frame, floored in wool rugs over sealed board, with a wood stove, an outdoor bath and a bed positioned so you wake facing the rock.
A solar array behind the ridge covers about sixty per cent of the camp's demand across the year; a generator covers the rest and runs between six in the morning and ten at night. After ten there is firelight, lamplight and the sky, which at Sabaia is not a romantic way of saying darkness. It is genuinely enough to walk by.
We close from mid-June to the end of August. The camp is unpleasant in that heat and we would rather say so than sell it. Staff who wish to work through the closure move to Verane or Lindhavn for the summer; most do.
Arrival
The house
Montreval SabaiaPiste d'Adeem, km 41Sabaia 8811Reservations for every house are taken centrally on +44 20 7946 0139.
Who runs it
Rania Adnani
Director, Montreval Sabaia
What is here
Suites & villas
Tented suite — 52 m²
Canvas over cedar, a wood stove, an outdoor bath, and a bed placed so that you wake facing four hundred metres of rock.
From €1,150 a night, for 2
Tented suite — 96 m²
Six suites set apart at the northern end of the camp, each with a sitting tent, a private fire and a view down into the palm gardens.
From €2,400 a night, for 3
The table
The bath
A hammam under canvas, and a cold room at eleven degrees when the desert is at thirty.
Three treatment tents, a stone hammam built into the escarpment, and a cold room kept at eleven degrees without mechanical cooling.
Sérène SabaiaA guest letter
“The silence at night is not a figure of speech. On the second night I could hear my own heartbeat and had to sit up and think about it for a while.”
Daniel Okonkwo, Porto Sella
Six nights in an Escarpment Tent, November
Elsewhere
Lake Verane, the Verane Valley
The first house. A farmhouse, a boathouse and a long wall of glass facing the water.
38 rooms and suites — From €780 a night
Above Manda Cove, the Calanera Coast
Four terraces cut into the cliff, and a staircase of two hundred and eleven steps down to the sea.
41 rooms and suites — From €690 a night
Aubris village, the Aubris Downs
A vineyard house with twenty-two rooms, a working cellar and a very good baker.
22 rooms and suites — From €640 a night
Reservations
Our own team answers, not an agency. Rates fall on the fourth night and again on the seventh, which tells you what we would prefer.
