Versace hotel to refrigerate beach

You can't make this stuff up.

A LUXURY hotel in Dubai is to create the first refrigerated beach so hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days.

The Palazzo Versace fashion house will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface, reports The Australian.

The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach.

"We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on," said Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace.

"This is the kind of luxury that top people want."

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 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.

Excuse me. Did someone say there was a global financial crisis?
I guess they missed that story.

H/T UAE Community Blog