The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Beirut’s sybaritic playground
The Phoenicia’s glamour is undimmed by war and last year’s bomb blast, says Mark C O’Flaherty
Architecture with a macabre past can have a haunting pull. It’s a bitter reality that there are few landmark buildings in Beirut without this. To see the city suffer again so horrifically last August, with images of an explosion in the city akin to Pathé newsreel of Bikini Atoll in the 1940s, was heartbreaking. For those who know the geography of the waterfront in Beirut, it was immediately apparent that the blast wave hit the homes and main hotels around the Central District, Gemmayzeh and along the Corniche with full force. The heart of the city was destroyed. But Beirut will rebuild. As it always does. And the Phoenicia Hotel will be a key part of it.
“We have been through this a few times before in the 60-year history of the Phoenicia, or should I say phoenix,” says Mazen Salha, owner and chairman of the Société des Grands Hôtels du Liban. “We hope to have partially reopened by late summer.” The damage from last year was mainly cosmetic (including to most of the glass), but in a hotel with nearly 500 rooms, these repairs are no mean feat.
The first guests checked into the Phoenicia in the 1960s, when Beirut was at its most hedonistic. Images of the jet set in and around an oval pool, surrounded by gleaming white columns, capture that vintage Kodacolor energy you only get when it’s 80 degrees and someone in a white jacket is on their way with a tray of drinks.
In more recent years, the hotel had regained a lot of that 1960s glamour. It reopened after a $100 million restoration in 2000. The Amethyste Lounge was a great cocktail spot, next to a new swimming pool with folkloric sea creatures emblazoned in tiles on its bottom. For a long time before that, the Phoenicia was dark. From 1975 to 1990, the city suffered a civil war that would kill around 120,000 people.
The hotels of downtown Beirut became repurposed as impromptu HQ for opposing factions in the conflict. What had been a playground for international sybarites became a war zone. “The Battle of the Hotels”, as it became known, was an early part of the saga – lasting several months. As dystopian urban visions go, it could have been penned by JG Ballard. The whole Slim Aarons-style good life was replaced by war photographers capturing debris and gunplay in grainy black and white.
Of the three buildings occupied during the battle, The Holiday Inn remains abandoned – visibly and dramatically scarred by artillery hits. There’s something inherently nightmarish about the idea of a Holiday Inn – the lowest common denominator of international safe harbour and comfort – transformed into a hellscape. Today, it serves as a permanent monument to the war. Walk past it and you might see military tanks roll out from its car park; the building remains under army control.
Another of the buildings occupied was the St George hotel, which reopened its pool and restaurant for years, but became mired in complex political issues and was damaged severely by the explosion that assassinated ex-PM Rafik Hariri outside the building in 2005. It was closed permanently last July, just a few days before the shock waves from the ammonium nitrate blast.
The survival of the Phoenicia through so many eras, and its history, are cause for celebration and hope. It is not just the civil war and the 2020 explosion that it survived, but also the July conflict with Israel in 2006.
The shiny new souks, full of high fashion and fancy dining, have been around for more than 10 years now, and flagged up the city as a place for design and hedonism for a new era. But few developments will ever have the impact of the Phoenicia hotel, erected as a modernist landmark in 1961, designed by American architect Edward Durell Stone, who also worked on Radio City Music Hall and New York’s MoMA in the 1930s. It is a hotel with great bones: all marble and polish, crystal chandeliers and oldfashioned luxury.
While Beirut’s Le Gray and the Four Seasons – both nearby, and both also undergoing major repairs – brought a new, 21st-century beat to the neighbourhood, the Phoenicia is beloved by Beirutis and people with long-term connections to the city. It’s where you went for your mum’s birthday to have dinner at the Mosaic restaurant, and your dad would get stuck into the Johnnie Walker and cigars. It’s where you got married, wearing Elie Saab couture. It’s where you spent a few days by the pool after wine-tasting in the Bekaa Valley, before flying back to London, Paris or New York.
Life at the Phoenicia is on pause, but it will be coming back. The iconic hotel will be part of a new chapter for the city – hopefully one with sustainable happiness and stability. phoeniciabeirut.com
It is a hotel with great bones: all marble and polish, chandeliers and old-fashioned luxury
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