Rise Again

Three old Lebanese houses, clustered around a courtyard shaded by a giant olive tree. Until summer 2020, they formed a popular restaurant in Beirut’s Gemmayzeh neighbourhood: on 4 August that year, a major explosion at the city’s nearby port made the restaurant another victim – among hundreds – of closure. But this story has a happier ending: a foresighted entrepreneur bought the site and it has recently reopened as Beihouse, a private members’ club whose interiors by Linda Boronkay Design Studio are a joyous tribute to Lebanese craftsmanship.

“I had no connection to the city whatsoever; it came about through a random enquiry to our website,” explains Boronkay about how she first heard about Beihouse, “but from the start it was very clear to me that this was a passion project.”

With near-ruined buildings easy pickings for corporates wanting to replace them with high-rises, Beihouse is a defiant statement against unsuitable, cash-grab development as well as a simply gorgeous place to hang out. “They already had some amazing heritage architects on board, Dagher Hanna & Partners, but they wanted someone from a different country, with a fresh point of view, for the interiors,” says Boronkay of the direction that her client wanted to go in. And as the former design director of Soho House, Boronkay knows a thing or two about creating members’ clubs that fuse a comfortable bohemian style with the unique identity of a destination.

Lebanon’s cultural identity and deep well of artisan talent was of particular interest to Beihouse’s owners. On her first site visit – where she found the buildings “very much in ruins” – Boronkay was whisked around workshop after workshop to get inspired for how she might introduce local craft skills into her scheme.

“There was glassblowing, metalwork, straw marquetry, wood carving, block-printing, trompe l’oeil… It was absolutely mind-blowing,” she says. And whereas many schemes might start with a narrative or an idea of who the clientele might be, this project was entirely based around those skills. “It was like having this amazing menu we could take from and we just had to decide where to fit them in,” says Borokay.

One of the three buildings contains a garden bar and lounge, with a private ceramics studio and rooftop garden above; the second is a multi-room restaurant (the chef Tarek Alameddine is ex Noma), with a cigar lounge upstairs; and the third is the back-of-house support area. Much of the furniture is bespoke, down to the portable lamps in the courtyard, supplemented by antique and vintage pieces.

Dagher Hanna & Partners “held our hands very tightly and advised on what was an appropriate intervention and what wasn’t,” says Boronkay, and the interior architecture is particularly magnificent, with generous marble architraves and elaborate cornicing, setting off the high ceilings.

“We wanted lots of stand-out moments where people will always discover something new,” she continues: in the garden lounge, a mosaic floor features martini glasses, cigarettes and flowers. Swirling plasterwork ceiling roses – like a cloud, with stars dotted around them – and a brass bas-relief fireplace with a cigar-leaf motif in the cigar lounge are just two examples of the way that the studio has given new life to artisanal traditions. There’s an opulence to the antique lighting, patterned low sofas and rich colour scheme, but it’s cleverly tempered by, say, a plain slubby curtain or a cluster of artworks, hung as canvases without frames.

The olive tree in the courtyard was originally going to be dug up and moved somewhere else, but in the end it was considered too beautiful, and too symbolic to go. “Everyone we encountered had a personal story about the blast,” says Boronkay. “But what was also very apparent is the effervescent energy of the locals, and their resilience, and their joie de vivre. That was very captivating and emotional for us. It became our passion project as well. It just felt so much bigger and better than other hospitality projects, because it had a real mission to bring people together – a safe haven where they can forget about their everyday problems.”