Need to know
Rooms
11, including six suites.
Check–Out
Noon. Earliest check-in, 3pm. Both are flexible, subject to availability (charges may apply).
More details
Rates include an à la carte breakfast and welcome soft drink or glass of wine and snacks in your room: sandwiches, tartlets, olives and crudités. And at turndown each night guests get a different nightcap (vermouth, cognac…) and chocolate pralines.
Also
The hotel has a huge glass elevator (with street access) to all floors and some rooms are adapted for guests with mobility issues.
At the hotel
Garden terraces, roof deck, gym, free-to-hire bikes, charged dry-cleaning service, and free WiFi. In rooms: TV, iPad to control room features, Sjostrand coffee-maker, tea-making kit, minibar with free soft drinks and bottled water, and custom bath products.
Our favourite rooms
Rooms are as sleek and precision styled as the architecture, either set in the main Bauhaus building or in the newer glazed annexe. They’re dressed in walnut and tulip wood, travertine stone and granite, with silken carpets adding a pop of colour, custom furnishings by French makers Studio Liaigre, and artwork from the owners’ private collection, all by up-and-coming or established Israeli talents. Plus some very cool tech: TVs built into silver monoliths, Japanese toilets, iPads that swish the curtains about and set mood lighting. The Penthouse is as elegant a city pad as you could want, right down to the fresh green apples and white roses that greet guests, with a large terrace, bath tub with a view and wholly free minibar (including pre-mixed cocktails and baked treats from R2M’s pâtisserie). And, the glass-walled Garden Suites reveal quite the panorama and let you admire Piet Oudolf’s green-fingered work. Obviously, you could close the curtains, but they would also certainly suit more exhibitionist guests.
Poolside
Sliced into the rooftop of the Bauhaus building, with views of the neighbourhood’s aesthetically pleasing alabaster structures and shining skyscrapers, is a shaded terrace with a golden-marble infinity pool. Submerge yourself on one of the interior benches or sun yourself on one of the seats and sunloungers laid out around the sides.
Spa
There’s a serious gym onsite, packed with Cybex and Life Fitness gear. While there’s no spa, the hotel has teamed up with Yoko Kitahara in historic Jaffa (a 15-minute taxi ride away), which specialises in Japanese-style spoiling: massages with herbal poultices, acupressure, shiatsu, tui na. On request the hotel can arrange a personal trainer or even a class if you’re staying as a group.
Packing tips
We suppose boning up on the Bauhaus movement will help you to casually converse about functional shapes, Marcel Breuer and the like. And, if you’re staying in one of the glass-walled suites and are concerned about staying modest, don’t worry, luxurious robes are supplied.
Also
When modernising the building, the hotel took out one of the interior staircases and used the shaft to add a very cool glass elevator – and you can still see the ghost of the former stairs in the unrestored walls.
Children
Those who appreciate the fine lines of the International Style and leisurely paced tasting menus (ie adults) are more the hotel’s clientele, but kids old enough to stay in a separate room are welcome.
Sustainability efforts
The hotel’s beautiful core is a 1933 Bauhaus building that’s been cautiously and lovingly restored, and added to in keeping with Israel Conservation Authority guidelines. The owners, Torontonian billionaires Heather Reisman and Gerald Schwartz, rather sweetly see the hotel as their gift to the city, and it certainly was a labour of love, with the whole building suspended at one point in order to turn its lower quarters into a gym and restaurant. And, the beautiful Eclectic-style building next door is the HQ for the pair’s philanthropic HESEG foundation, which provides education and accommodation for the Israeli Defense Force’s ‘lone soldiers’ who don’t have family in Israel or are underprivileged.