RIYADH: A new holistic health resort set to open at the Red Sea’s Amaala project will use traditional wellness therapies in a luxury setting, its CEO told Arab News.
Jayasom cofounder and CEO Karen Campbell said: “A hallmark of what we want to do is to create a very bespoke experience based on somebody who has too much stress and can’t sleep, somebody else who feels that they don’t digest very well, or they get up multiple times during the night; Somebody else who wants to be fit, somebody who wants to lose a couple of kilos.
“All of these are unique, so it’s not a matter of just rolling out a package. It’s a matter of talking, understanding, and drawing from this huge raft of treatments and interventions that we have to put together a curated experience that is really fit for them.”
Campbell spoke about how the resort combines the scientific and medical aspects of wellness while reaching into the wisdom of the old: how did our mothers and grandmothers remedy headaches or stomach pain?
“In modern day life, so much of that has been lost with hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, drugstores and things like that.
“We want to go back and tap into that understanding and really draw that together.
“This is not to deny the effectiveness of modern medicine, but to acknowledge that the old and new can work together.”
The resort will offer curated retreats focused on a particular wellness goal customized to each guest or group.
The name, combining Sanskrit and Thai origins, means a sanctuary for the heart. “You can think of it both in a cardiac sense, like a physical house, and you can think of it in a soul sense, a place for that soul to be peaceful, to become, to be, to be a purpose.”
The property itself has attractions such as hydrothermal bathing and sound and music sessions.
“We have an area called a farm belt where we actually have vegetables and a herb garden on the property,” Campbell explained.
“What we intend to do is to have, children in particular but adults as well, in that farm belt foraging with a chef and then coming to a cooking studio so they can actually take that ingredient and they can feature it in a tea or some sort of decoction or a dish that they might want to eat later on.”
The property is entirely solar-powered and recycles all of its water, the CEO added.
“We have a beautiful sustainability beach. We have turtles that are nesting on the beach. There are certain times of the year when we can observe the turtles, but we need to protect that space for them.
“We intend to have honeybees; there are some specific native honeybees that are really attuned to the desert conditions.”
