Director - Urban Realm and Landscape Design for Hospitality Portfolio

About the Role

Qiddiya Investment Company is pioneering a transformative destination to redefine entertainment, culture, and hospitality within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Hospitality Business Unit is responsible for building a diverse portfolio of hotel properties essential to this vision. We seek an accomplished professional to lead the urban realm and landscape design direction across these hospitality assets, ensuring exceptional levels of design quality, guest experience, and commercial success.

The successful candidate will orchestrate the design narratives for outdoor spaces and arrival experiences across all hotel tiers. This includes creating distinctive, immersive environments aligned with Qiddiya's ambitions while ensuring smooth integration between ground planes and adjacent zones.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the conceptualization and design of urban realm and landscape elements for hospitality settings, from initial development briefs through to final approved designs, ensuring emotive, unique, and commercially viable outdoor environments that follow Qiddiya, district, and operator visions.
• Effectively communicate and advocate landscape proposals through compelling storytelling, visuals, and presentations to acquire timely approvals across governance processes.
• Establish design principles, planting schemes, material selections, and signature elements specific to each hotel category, creating a cohesive and recognizable design language throughout the portfolio.
• Oversee the briefing of consultants and clearly define scopes, ensuring all design inputs meet the development requirements, design objectives, operator standards, and governance criteria.
• Manage visualization and design communications, including CGI strategies, to ensure alignment with narratives and stakeholder expectations.
• Lead and supervise landscape and specialty consultants, managing appointment strategies, deliverables, quality control, and ensuring creative consistency.
• Provide governance to embedded design management teams, reviewing and endorsing landscape deliverables to maintain approved design intent throughout delivery phases.
• Conduct thorough milestone design reviews, offering detailed feedback to support continuous design advancement.
• Contribute technical input for development briefs and coordinate cross-disciplinary collaboration, embedding harmonious external environments covering arrivals, transition areas, and amenities.
• Drive coordination across architectural, interior design, and masterplanning teams, ensuring seamless connectivity between external zones.
• Supervise landscape-related FF&E and OS&E strategies, ensuring these align with design intent and commercial objectives.
• Lead prototyping and mock-ups for planting, materials, and paving to secure quality up to landscape freeze stage.
• Offer creative and technical oversight during design and construction phases to resolve interface issues and maintain design integrity.
• Guide value engineering and design optimization efforts, balancing design vision against environmental performance, guest experience, cost constraints, project schedule, and operational needs.
• Promote innovation in guest experience enhancements, materials selection, and sensory design, incorporating ESG initiatives and Vision 2030 objectives.
• Mentor design teams and foster continuous improvement in design processes, standards, and best practices across the hospitality portfolio.

Candidate Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Landscape Architecture, Urban Design, or a related field.
• Professional accreditation or recognized certification desirable (e.g., CMLI, ASLA, or equivalent).
• At least 15 years of professional experience in design management within architecture or interior design sectors.
• In-depth expertise in landscape and urban realm design with proficiency operating at masterplan scale down to detailed external environment design.
• Comprehensive understanding of hospitality outdoor design, including arrival sequences, spatial flow, planting, materials, and guest-focused outdoor experiences.
• Strong creative skills and spatial reasoning to translate landscape narratives into effective concepts and coordinated outputs.
• Experience managing multi-disciplinary landscape consultants and influencing design outcomes collaboratively.
• Excellent stakeholder management capabilities to advocate landscape vision and facilitate decision-making.
• Commercial knowledge of landscape construction, FF&E budgeting, scheduling limitations, and impact of value engineering.
• Good command of climate-responsive design practices, including planting, irrigation, and environmental systems suited to KSA/GCC environments.
• Proficiency with design and project coordination software such as AutoCAD, Rhino, Adobe Creative Cloud, and BIM/CDE platforms.
• Preferred experience includes senior leadership roles in landscape or urban realm design within design firms or developer environments and extensive delivery of hospitality or resort landscape projects from concept through construction phases.
• Experienced in managing specialist sub-consultants for landscape elements such as water features and lighting.
• Track record of integrating landscape work with architecture, interiors, and masterplanning teams.
• Demonstrated experience running landscape prototyping, material testing, and mock-up developments.
• Strong presentation skills with senior stakeholders, including hospitality operators.
• Experience working in KSA, GCC, or comparable large-scale development contexts is highly desirable.