The Jaffa Hotel opened to guests in August, and shortly after, The Chapel bar - housed in the convent’s original chapel hall - became the site of nightly dance parties. The basement-level spa and gym were carved around Crusader-era walls and the upper-level guest rooms have been renovated from a former Turkish prison, which later became a Jewish-run prison after the founding of the State of Israel, and housed notorious criminals including the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. This resort has layers upon layers of history. The building, which was converted into British military headquarters during World War II before sitting abandoned for 50 years, now sports elegant tiling, sophisticated décor and hand-painted recreations of the building’s original murals.Īnd across the street from the landmark Jaffa Clock Tower, a limestone column built by a Jew 100 years ago to honor the Ottoman reign in Palestine, sits the sprawling Setai Tel Aviv. Formerly known as the Jerusalem Hotel, the Drisco’s structure was built by two evangelical Christian brothers who wanted a luxury stopover for pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. The Drisco, a 42-room property breathes life back into a majestic Ottoman building from 1866. “You don’t have to embellish an embellished product.”Ī short walk away in Jaffa’s American Colony neighborhood, where 100-year-old clapboard houses offer a reminder of the Christian pilgrims from New England who settled there in the 1880s, another restored building has been revived as a grand hotel. The municipality then invested $225 million in its downtrodden flea market, which today is a treasure trove of antiques by day and a bustling hub of twinkling lights, al fresco cafes and impossibly trendy bars by night. Jaffa’s resurrection began in 2007, when the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality renovated its ancient port - said to be where Jonah set out to meet his whale - and brought in restaurants, businesses and a food hall. Peter’s church, with its New Spanish Baroque architecture and towering belfry and from Jaffa’s elegantly restored Old City, anchored by its Ottoman-era clock tower. Rosen’s U.S.-based RFR Holding, designed by John Pawson and is now part of the Luxury Collection by Marriott, opened a stone’s throw from Yoko Kitahara, an opulent new Japanese spa from the handsome St. The five-star property takes its name from the famed Jaffa orange, a citrus with few seeds that is particularly sweet. Today, when guests step into the cool, light-washed lobby of The Jaffa Hotel, a sparkling property that opened last summer, their eyes are drawn to that graceful ribbon of stone, now excavated, shined up and extending through the glass-enclosed seating area and out into the hotel’s lush courtyard. And that’s not all: Add to the mix of this major makeover a new lush Japanese spa, a bustling night life district and a flea market packed with restaurants led by major Israeli chefs. Three new luxury properties - The Setai Tel Aviv (in a former Ottoman prison with Crusader-era origins) The Jaffa (an Aby Rosen recreation of a former hospice for malaria victims) and The Drisco, a revival of Jaffa’s first luxury hotel, shuttered since 1940) - opened last year, within spitting distance of each other. Not so anymore: Historical Jaffa, it’s fair to say, has gone full-throttle luxe. It was absorbed into greater Tel Aviv in 1950 and has long been seen as the humbler, more downtrodden section of the city. This 3,000-year-old harbor is a labyrinth of white stone alleys, hushed mosques and markets brimming with antiques and spices.īut the district, once claimed by King David, the Pharaohs and even Napoleon, has for decades been in the shadow of shiny Tel Aviv. Jaffa, the age-old Abbott to youthful Tel Aviv’s Costello, is an ancient port in the midst of a luxury renaissance.
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