Elma Arts Complex

The building came first, and it is still the reason to come. Yaakov Rechter drew it in 1968 as the Mivtachim Sanatorium, a rest home for workers, and it became one of the set pieces of Israeli Brutalism: a long, stepped mass of concrete and glass laid into the Carmel ridge above Zichron Ya'akov. The design won Rechter the Israel Prize for architecture. Then the years turned against it. The sanatorium closed, the concrete stained, and by the time it stood empty it was close enough to demolition that a lesser story would have ended there.

It did not. The collector Lily Elstein bought the ruin in 2005 and gave the job of bringing it back to Amnon Rechter, the architect's son, with a plain brief: return it to the original drawings, then add what the first plans never held. It reopened at the end of 2014. Rooms and cottages run along the slope, most of them facing west over the pines to the coastal plain, and the Mediterranean somewhere past that.

Elma stands for Elstein Music and Art, and the name is load-bearing. At the heart of the place is a proper concert hall, the 420-seat Elma Hall, tuned by banners that drop and lift to reset the acoustics for each programme, with two Steinway concert grands and a pipe organ built by the German house Klais. A smaller room, the Cube, takes the jazz and the late sets. Two galleries and a collection strung the length of the corridors push the building somewhere between a hotel and a museum, the kind of place where the person at the next breakfast table has come up for the weekend to play.

What this does to a stay is subtle. The music is not a turndown gimmick or a lobby pianist filling the silence. It is the reason the house exists, and everything else, the rooms, the pools, the kosher kitchen, arranges itself around the evening's programme rather than the other way about.

The kitchen is kosher and takes the constraint as a discipline rather than an apology, built around a chef's restaurant that reads the season more than the rulebook. There is a spa with a hammam, and two pools, one glazed indoors against the view and one open to the air, both set right on the lip of the drop. None of it strains for effect. The drama is already outside the glass.

And the address earns the drive. Zichron Ya'akov, one of the first of the Rothschild wine colonies, keeps its old street and its cellars within a walk, and the Carmel vineyards run on from there. Haifa and the coast are a short way north, Tel Aviv about an hour south. You can come for a concert and stay the night, or come for the architecture and let the programme find you. Either way the place has a clear idea of itself, which is rarer than a sea view and lasts longer.