The Royal Commission for AlUla wanted to bring one of the world’s most famous private members’ clubs to one of the world’s most remote and ancient places. Annabel’s had only ever existed on Berkeley Square. The brief was to take it to the Saudi desert and lose nothing on the way. Not a branded pop-up, not a tribute, but the club itself, rebuilt from the ground up, season after season, on sites that had never seen a restaurant before.

For our first season, we went inside the walls of the UNESCO-listed fort at Hegra and grew a rainforest. It opened under pandemic restrictions, by special permission of the Royal Commission, at a time when almost nothing else in the world was opening at all. At the centre stood a six-metre sculptural tree, hung with gilded monkeys and parrots caught mid-flight. Ancient sandstone on every side, a canopy of green overhead. It shouldn’t have worked. It did.

The following season the brief got bigger. Annabel’s moved to Jabal Ikmah, and with it came the Garden Room, recreated not as a nod to Mayfair but as close to the original as the desert would allow, then operated for six months straight. A towering central tree anchored the room, surrounded by more than 500 hand-selected flowers and plants, dense enough that guests forgot, for an evening, where they were. Behind a discreet door sat the Monkey Room, a private dining room with Annabel’s signature ape sculpture presiding at the head of the table. The Mayfair menus travelled with us, alongside alcohol-free cocktails built on dates and local citrus, a small, deliberate nod to where we were standing.

For the fourth season, I brought Annabel’s back to AlUla independently, as joint Event Director in partnership with Radical Food. This time we were handed a blank timber structure and a chance to start again. We kept the DNA of the Mayfair garden and let the desert in. Towering palms formed the roof, the night sky did the rest. Upholstered booths in layered, patterned textiles gathered around a central tree engineered in custom steel and clad in real bark. Mirrored trellis caught the candlelight, Carrara marble tabletops sat beneath wireframe chairs, and the whole room felt like it had been there for years rather than weeks. Over two months, in one of AlUla’s quietest stretches of the year, the 100-cover restaurant served around 1,500 guests and became one of the most shared destinations of the season.

Three seasons, three sites, one club. Each time, the same test: would a Mayfair regular walk in and feel at home?