Design hotspot: Tel Aviv
Image: A French convent and hospital’s chapel now serves as the bar of the Jaffa Hotel in Tel Aviv. Photography: Amit Geron
Variously described as the Manhattan and Miami of the Middle East, Israel’s chilled-out Tel Aviv has turned its back on the wider region’s religious divisions and made an open-all-hours party of diversity. Avowedly secular and supportive of the highest number of tech start-ups outside Silicon Valley, it is a beguiling rub-up of skyscraper, ancient city (Tel Aviv flowered in 1909 just outside of the 4000-year-old port city of Jaffa), pristine beachfront and Bauhaus architecture.
Add to those electrifying contrasts a thriving art and design scene (Israel has the highest concentration of museums in the world), a culinary culture considered one of the most adventurous on the planet, coffee snobbery second only to Melbourne, the highest ownership of dogs per capita in the world, and a climate that bathes in sun for some 300 days per year and you have the most liberal, laid-back metropolis on the Mediterranean.
Image: Bauhaus Centre Tel Aviv. Instagram.com/parkbags
EXPERIENCE
Head to the Bauhaus Centre Tel Aviv and book the two-hour walking tour of the White City, an UNESCO World Heritage-listed site so named after the 4000 blanched Modernist buildings designed by the German-Jewish architects who fled the Berlin-based Bauhaus school before Hitler shut it down in 1933. It stands as an extraordinary regional tribute to the International Style.
Image: Design Museum Holon. Photography: Yael Pincus
The Design Museum Holon is a 20-minute drive out of Tel Aviv that’s well worth a look. Housed in rust-coloured steel swoops of Ron Arad architecture, it is both an educational resource and an edgy exhibition platform premised on elevating creative industries in Israeli culture.
Found in the super-arty heart of ancient Jaffa, Saga is a happy hybrid of shop, gallery, cafe, studio space and artists’ residence, all given to the promotion of local talent. Pick up a piece of unique Israeli design (five major institutions are committed to the nation’s pursuit to keep standards high) or some fabulous vintage finds (the Bauhaus bent of White City means wonders abound). A further eight-minute walk will reward with plenty of Dead Sea pampering products on over at Ahava.
Elemento is an interior design studio owned by leading Tel Aviv-based designer Yossy Goldberg, who flies the flag for regionalism with one-of- a-kind luxury furnishings that lean towards the 1960s and ’70s. Shop the showroom for local lighting and accessories.
Image: The Jaffa Pool. Photography: Amit Geron
STAY
What do you get when the archduke of minimalism, British architect John Pawson, meets the School of the Sisterhood of Saint Joseph high on a hill in the old port city of Jaffa? You get the heavenly Jaffa Hotel: a luxury 120-room resort resurrected from the 19th- century Neo-Romanesque remnants of a former French convent and hospital. If the budget allows, book one of the 32 private residences in this high church of the holiday.