The Hotel Redefining Luxury in the Maldives

Written in literature for the W Maldives is a description of the hotel as a “heart-shaped island”. Unlike locations in New York, London and Shanghai, squeezed between skyscrapers in heaving cities, the Maldives site is its own natural island, miles away from any metropolitan centre. But what’s striking about its description as “heart-shaped” is that, if you view the hotel via satellite map, rather than the outline of a cartoonish symbol, you’ll see something like the irregular shape of a human heart. While this revelation is arguably the least interesting thing about the W Maldives, the difference does remind us that this is not a man-made experience, but a place that’s alive and deeply connected to the rest of the archipelago.

That sense of interconnectedness is realised immediately, before you make it to the hotel. International arrivals land in Malé, the islands’ capital and most populous city, then board a 25-minute seaplane to the hotel, roughly 104km away. It’s on that flight that guests are given their first glimpse of the location’s expansive beauty. Made up of 1,200 islands within 20 natural atolls – a ring-shaped reef formed from a submerged volcano – the Maldives is the smallest country in Asia, but not short of spectacle when seen from 30,000 feet. Tiny, jewel-toned islands and an ultramarine palette greet guests on the journey from Malé Atoll to North Ari Atoll, where the hotel is located. At the W Maldives – or Fesdhoo Island, to give its proper Dhivehi name – your arrival is marked by waving staff, blistering heat and a buggy ride along the veins of the island.

Opened in 2006, the hotel is known by its nickname ‘the original wavemaker’ for its pioneering role in the Maldivian luxury landscape. But with almost 20 years of service under its belt, 2025 marks a new chapter for the hotel: a grand reopening following an extensive, ten-month renovation. For the redesign, owners Marriott International tapped interior designer Isabelle Miaja and her Miaja Design Group, a Singapore-based firm with a sizable Asian portfolio that includes luxury resorts in Fiji and private commissions in the Philippines. According to MDG, the creative vision for Fesdhoo was a bio-boho aesthetic that paid homage to the Maldives’ “thriving marine life and lush flora while infusing modern sophistication”.

In person, this meant that the hotel’s rooms (of which there are 77) were nature-themed, just not in a Rainforest Café kind of way. The Escape villas, part of the island’s beachfront offering, took the mangrove as their icon, a plant locally referred to as “khuli” by Maldivians. Known to inhabit at least 150 islands of the Maldives, the water-dwelling shrub has long, spindly roots that MDG used as design accents, sprawled across wardrobes, as coffee table legs, and etched into a large, circular headboard. Elsewhere in the villa, a separate bathroom with a half-open ceiling allowed the island’s real foliage to spill inside, while an impressive, free-standing bath acted as a focal point – but it was the room’s outside space that completed the story. Through the bedroom’s patio doors is a private deck with a pool and jacuzzi, and just beyond that, the island’s white sand beach, a pebble’s throw from the Indian Ocean. Thanks to the foliage surrounding the enclosed space, guests are treated to incredible ocean views and intimate privacy at once. A rooftop snook, situated on the second floor, can be accessed via a spiral staircase on the outside of the villa, home to an enormous sofa swing under a natural palm roof.

Arguably the archetype of Maldivian luxury, the hotel’s overwater villas are built on stilts directly into the ocean, reached by a separate gangway extended from the main island. Continuing the nature theme, these villas took the whale shark as inspiration, native to the South Ari Atoll, just below the W. The sharks’ distinctive spots and stripes are dotted around the room, with pointillist patterns on the terrazzo floor, and squiggly bands as reliefs on the walls. Another private deck offered a very different experience from the beachfront villas – zero foliage, just a tranquil expanse of ocean as far as the eye could see. Back inside the villa and a roomy bathroom offers the same ocean view, but from the comfort of the tub. During turndown, a rug in the main bedroom is removed to reveal a circular window in the floor, where guests can watch gentle waves lap against the bottom of the room.

Outside of the rooms, culinary experiences are central to the hotel’s hospitality offering. Kitchen, the W’s all-day dining bistro, is accessed via paving stones across a shallow pond. Once inside, chefs prepare a wide variety of international dishes from an open-style kitchen, and there’s even dining tables in the outside pond, so guests can dip their toes while tucking into lunch. And while the Wet Deck provides all your day-time needs, with a swim-up bar and fresh salads, Fish is the culinary pièce de résistance, an impressive overwater restaurant on stilts in the Indian Ocean. Operating on a sustainable ‘ocean-to-table’ mantra, Fish is the hotel’s fine dining experience, where you can enjoy species native to the waters, like skipjack tuna, humpback red snapper, bluestripe snapper and mahi-mahi.

But – as you might expect from an island escape – it’s the W Maldives’ extra-curriculars that extend far beyond those of a normal hotel. Guests can take part in late-night line fishing, and hotel chefs will prepare their catch that night. Elsewhere, the island’s expansive coral reef is a hotspot for snorkellers, who’ll witness Fesdhoo’s thriving aquatic ecosystem on guided snorkelling tours. Another trip out to sea, and the hotel’s marine experts will take you to a nurse shark hotspot where you can swim close enough to touch them. while Gaathafushi Island – a nearby uninhabited islet – is privately owned by the hotel, its sunswept beaches and giant palm trees ripe for exploration by guests, a haven within a haven at the Maldives’ greatest retreat.

Find out more about the W Maldives here.