Crafted By Place

At Nujuma, a new partnership with Art of Heritage brings Saudi craftsmanship to the Red Sea

Luxury hotels increasingly speak about a sense of place, but the idea becomes more meaningful when the people, skills and objects of that place are allowed inside.

At Nujuma, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve, that relationship is taking a new form through a partnership with Art of Heritage, the Saudi non-profit dedicated to the preservation, practice and evolution of the Kingdom’s craft traditions. Launching around Saudi National Day, the collaboration brings the work and knowledge of Saudi artisans into a resort already conceived around its Red Sea setting.

Nujuma sits on Ummahat Island within The Red Sea destination, reached across waters that remain one of its defining features. The resort is the first Ritz-Carlton Reserve in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, with 65 beach and overwater villas designed by Foster + Partners. Their shell-like forms curl around the island, while private pools and wide views keep the Red Sea constantly present. Now the cultural landscape is being drawn further into the experience.

A LIVING ARCHIVE

Art of Heritage brings considerable weight to that proposition. The organisation traces its origins to the work of AlNahda, the Saudi women’s society founded in 1962. Art of Heritage developed within AlNahda as a centre concerned with the preservation and reproduction of traditional textiles, pottery and other forms of making before eventually becoming an independent non-profit organisation. Art of Heritage itself dates its establishment to 1990 and its independence to 2009, while AlNahda’s own historical records place the heritage programme around 1991 and note its later spin-off. The slight variation in institutional timelines reflects how the initiative developed from an existing programme into a separate organisation rather than appearing fully formed on a single date.

More remarkable is what it has assembled since. Art of Heritage holds an archive of approximately 57,000 objects and records relating to Saudi material and social history. The collection includes nearly 3,000 pieces of jewellery, more than 3,000 textiles, garments, carpets and furnishings, tens of thousands of photographs and everyday objects, and more than 1,000 books, manuscripts, documents and audiovisual records. Centuries-old maps and camel howdahs sit within the same collection, illustrating the breadth of everyday life the archive seeks to document.

That archive is not intended to remain static. A 30-year agreement signed with Misk Heritage Museum, Asaan, in 2025 will see the collection digitised, preserved and eventually incorporated into the museum’s exhibitions, educational programmes and community initiatives.

For Art of Heritage, preservation has always been tied to continued practice. Its work extends into contemporary collections, exhibitions, collaborations, workshops and training, with artisans using inherited techniques to produce objects for modern life. Proceeds are reinvested into education and skills development, while training and employment programmes support women, young people and people of determination.

That distinction is important. A craft survives differently when it remains something people know how to make.

FROM ARCHIVE TO OBJECT

Saudi craft cannot be reduced to a single visual language. The Kingdom’s geography has produced markedly different approaches to dress, embroidery, weaving, jewellery, pottery and domestic objects, with materials and motifs shaped by region, available resources, trade and ways of life.

Art of Heritage’s archive has increasingly become a resource for understanding those distinctions. In a collaboration with Asprey, for example, CEO HRH Princess Nourah Al Faisal drew upon the organisation’s collection to develop five interpretations of the British house’s 1781 pochette. Each referenced embroidery, architecture, clothing and decorative traditions associated with different regions of Saudi Arabia.

Its fashion work follows a similar philosophy. A 2025 collaboration with designer Serra Kirdar emerged after she visited the Art of Heritage atelier and encountered the artisans and techniques being maintained there, eventually resulting in a collection that placed traditional craftsmanship within contemporary design.

These projects reveal why an organisation such as Art of Heritage is particularly relevant to hospitality. A beautifully made object can decorate a room. An object connected to a documented technique, regional tradition and practising artisan can tell the guest something about where that room exists.

At Nujuma, that becomes the basis of the partnership. “Heritage lives on through the people who practise it, and through the new connections their work makes possible,” Princess Nourah says. She describes Art of Heritage as an organisation created to preserve Saudi traditions while giving artisans the support and freedom to interpret them for the present and future. At Nujuma, those creations enter an international hospitality environment in which guests from around the world can encounter them.

THE RED SEA AS SETTING

There is a particular logic to placing this work on the Red Sea. Nujuma was conceived around immersion in its location. Its architecture, marine experiences, night sky, food and wellbeing programming are presented as different routes into understanding the destination, rather than treating the island purely as an isolated resort.

The Art of Heritage partnership adds a human dimension to that landscape. Saudi craft carries evidence of movement, environment and community. Textiles record patterns particular to regions. Embroidery can communicate local aesthetics and inherited methods. Clay vessels speak to material, function and daily life. The original announcement deliberately begins with those details, describing culture through “the embroidery of a garment, the shape of a clay vessel” and patterns whose origins can be recognised by those who know them.

For a traveller encountering Saudi Arabia through the Red Sea, these objects provide another way into the country. “We hope that a stay at Nujuma leaves guests with a deeper understanding of the place they are visiting,” says Dennis Sorensen, General Manager of Nujuma. His description of the collaboration is revealing: Art of Heritage is not being positioned simply as decoration inspired by Saudi culture, but as culture carried through the artisans who continue to practise it.

That approach also avoids one of the easiest traps in culturally rooted hospitality. Local identity can become aesthetic shorthand, reduced to recognisable patterns applied to interiors or objects without explaining where they came from, who made them or why they matter. Art of Heritage has spent decades collecting precisely the context that prevents that flattening.

WHAT TRAVELLERS TAKE HOME

There is another layer to the partnership that feels particularly relevant to contemporary luxury travel. The most memorable hotels increasingly leave guests with knowledge rather than simply amenities.

A traveller might arrive at Nujuma for the privacy of an overwater villa or the extraordinary marine environment surrounding it. Encountering Saudi craft through Art of Heritage introduces another narrative, one stretching far beyond the island to the communities, techniques and regional identities represented within the organisation’s archive and contemporary practice.

The partnership is intended to develop over time, with Nujuma and Art of Heritage describing it as an evolving relationship through which Saudi culture and craftsmanship can become a greater part of life at the resort. That evolution may ultimately be its most interesting aspect. Heritage does not remain alive because it is placed behind glass and admired. Archives are essential because they preserve evidence, knowledge and provenance, but craft itself depends upon hands

capable of continuing the work.

At Nujuma, those two ideas now meet. One of Saudi Arabia’s newest luxury destinations is creating space for traditions considerably older than the resort surrounding them, while Art of Heritage continues the work it began more than three decades ago: keeping the knowledge of making in circulation.

The result offers a more compelling definition of a sense of place. You do not simply see where you are. You begin to understand something of how it was made.