Israel’s hotel landscape offers a vibrant fusion of elegant settings, stylish chicness and playful decor. There are utterly fabulous boutique properties that offer a feast for the eyes with delightful rooftop lounges, cozy garden eateries, uniquely designed accommodations, and a cool retro vibe, as well as seaside retreats that put the “de” in de-stress.
One fashionable address is the 15-room Alma Hotel & Lounge in Tel Aviv, where the decor philosophy is all about vivid color splashes and bohemian chic, and where foodies will delight their palate at Alma Lounge as they settle into the Georgian-inspired furniture.
Design Hotels has put its stamp on two hotels in Israel: The 194-room Mamilla Hotel in Jerusalem, with its well-being center, rooftop lounge and a fave nightspot, the Winery, offering an extensive list of Israeli wines; and the 30-room Brown TLV in Tel Aviv, with its cocktail-hour lighting, low-slung chairs, and dark wood floors that create an intimate ambiance behind its facade of a former bank. Tel Aviv’s cosmopolitan lifestyle is also ideally suited for the sleekly designed the Rothschild 71, a carefully renovated International Style house built in 1934 offering 25 suites. Its restaurant, the Cantina, offers Italian dishes with Middle Eastern influences.
In Acre, meanwhile, The Efendi Hotel, which overlooks the historic city walls and the Mediterranean Sea beyond, embraces guests in its serene ambiance and breathtaking decor. Here, it’s the beauty of the building’s architecture and the outdoors that take center stage.
More name-dropping must include the 31-suite and very sumptuous Bayit Bagalil Hotel, surrounded by boutique wineries, and overlooking Lake Kinneret and the Galil Mountains, as well as the Beresheet Hotel, located near the ancient Spice Route, and right on the edge of the towering cliffs that slope down into the Ramon Crater, and designed to fit in with its surrounding desert landscape.
And this year will see the opening of The Ritz-Carlton, Herzliya overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the Waldorf Astoria Jerusalem.
