WORDS BY ABDULRAHMAN KHAIR

Three days at JOALI Maldives, the art-immersive island in Raa Atoll, that subverts all expectations from a beach holiday.

I arrived at JOALI the way I arrive everywhere lately – phone in my hand, a body in paradise, and a mind still hunched at a desk over the Arabian Sea. I’ve done the Maldives before, with its turquoise waters, the overwater villa, the dutiful sunset photo, and if I am honest, it had begun to feel like a screensaver. Gorgeous, looping, but strangely forgettable. I did not expect a small island in the Raa Atoll to reach in and unclench my hands.

It took about a day.

JOALI is not a resort with art in it, but one woman’s imagination, built at full scale and left out in the sun. The island belongs to Esin Güral Argat, who put it together like the private home of a worldly woman who collects one-of-a-kind things and arranges them with love, then lets the rest of us move in. With the Istanbul curators of No LaB, she commissioned more than a dozen artists to create works for the island.

We stayed in a two-bedroom beach villa, hushed and golden inside, with pale wood, rose-gold taps, light pooling on the floor like spilled honey, opening straight onto a private ribbon of sand and an infinity pool the colour of the lagoon beyond it.

There was something healing in the rhythm of the place. Waking each morning to that impossibly blue water, and being lulled to sleep each night by the hush of waves a few steps from the bed, is far from forgettable.

And the art keeps finding you. Beneath the lagoon, the New York sculptor Misha Kahn has grown a mosaic coral garden that deliberately mirrors the bleaching on the reefs nearby. One afternoon at the Art Studio, I glazed a bowl beside the resident artist, wet clay turning under my hands, and felt the forgotten pleasure of making something badly and not minding.

At Saoke, the overwater Japanese room conjured by architect Noriyoshi Muramatsu, the miso black cod arrived looking so beautiful I half-apologised to it before eating. Between courses, I looked down through the deck and found the lagoon turned to liquid silver by the moon. Inside, the unhurried gliding shapes of gentle reef sharks went about their night beneath my feet.

The night before, I went barefoot through the Street Market at Vandhoo under strings of light; two evenings on, TUH’U served Levantine mezze on the sand, palms lit gold overhead.

“I went looking for somewhere new in the Maldives, and I came home having found somewhere new in myself. So go, but leave the version of you that cannot sit still back at the airport. The island will introduce you to a kinder one.”

But it was the people who undid me. Every villa comes with a Jadugar – ‘magician’ in Dhivehi – and mine learned the shape of my days within hours. Coffee was ready before I asked for it, and the book I’d mentioned only once was waiting on my deck that afternoon as if it had always lived there. I kept catching the pink-clad staff in small acts of attention I was never meant to notice. It is this warmth I keep failing to describe to people at home.

The island carries its conscience lightly. The drinking water is bottled on site, in glass; the forest is left wild and uncut; the kitchens compost and sort out of view. One morning, I swam out to the coral nursery with the resident marine biologist, who showed me fronds of coral that other guests had planted and spoke about the reef the way you’d speak about someone you love. I came out of the water transformed.

And slowly, the island did its real, secret work. My Four Pillars massage unfolded in a private spa pavilion on stilts over the lagoon, with a glass-fronted sauna, a steam room, a treatment table, turquoise water unbroken to the horizon on every side. The next morning, I did aerial yoga on the open-air deck beside it, wrapped in the same endless panorama, hanging weightless in a cradle of silk and thinking, for the first time in months, about absolutely nothing. By the third day, I had stopped reaching for my phone, and by the third evening, I’d even stopped wondering where it was.

For families, JOALI has its own answer to that stillness. Summer Camp 2026 here runs from July 1 to August 31, hosting art workshops, sports clinics, and cultural experiences for children aged four to 12, anchored by residencies with double Olympic gold medallist Nicola Adams OBE and a roster of international artists.

On my last morning, I climbed the spiralling walkway into the Manta Treehouse, a great ray woven from wood and palm and hung high among the branches, and ate breakfast in the canopy while the sea glittered below.

At some point over those days, I had slowed almost without noticing, until I was moving the way a manta moves through open water – calm, easy, in no hurry to be anywhere. That, I think, is what JOALI offers, though it would never say as much – not just another beautiful island, but the rare luxury of being completely present in your own life.

I went looking for somewhere new in the Maldives, and I came home having found somewhere new in myself. So go, but leave the version of you that cannot sit still back at the airport. The island will introduce you to a kinder one.