For design
The Jaffa
Jaffa · Tel Aviv
An old hospital does not obviously want to become a hotel. The Jaffa keeps that argument going, and wins it. John Pawson took the nineteenth-century French infirmary and the convent beside it, stripped both back to their stone, and set his own quiet rooms inside walls that have stood through most of Jaffa's modern history.
The address is old Jaffa, a block back from the sea, where the port town runs into the bottom of Tel Aviv. Pawson's hand is deliberate and low: pale surfaces, deep window reveals, long clean lines that let the arches and the vaulting do the talking. The older rooms sit in the historic wing under high ceilings and tall windows; a newer block holds the contemporary suites, a few of them opening onto planted terraces. In the courtyard there is a pool, and around it the city drops to a hush. The convent chapel is still here, kept rather than gutted, which tells you how the place thinks about its own past.
Downstairs, under the original vaults, is where the hotel eats. Golda's works the stone arches for an Italian kitchen that stays kosher and dairy and takes its time, and the larger room carries the evenings. It is Mediterranean cooking with a New York accent, which is roughly the register of Jaffa itself these days. Breakfast is worth getting up for, and the coffee is taken seriously.
Jaffa is one of the oldest ports on the Mediterranean, and for years the money went to the towers up the coast. The Jaffa put it back in the old town, in a building worth the trouble, with a designer disciplined enough to leave the walls alone. We list it for that: a serious piece of restraint wrapped around real history, a short walk from the flea market and the harbour. It is a city hotel rather than a beach one, and it reads better for knowing the difference.
A longer reading of The Jaffa: the old hospital and its convent, the rooms across two ages, dinner under the vaults.
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Old Jaffa, a block back from the sea, where the port town meets the bottom of Tel Aviv.
120 rooms and suites across a restored nineteenth-century hospital and a new wing; interiors by John Pawson.
Golda's, and a dining room set under the old vaults.
The Jaffa flea market, the old port, the Bauhaus streets of Tel Aviv.
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