The Poli House by Karim Rashid
A building with its feet firmly in the turbulent early history of the founding of the state of Israel, Tel Aviv’s new hotel The Poli House has been lavished with audacious colour and playfulness by Karim Rashid in a very modern approach to its interiors that loudly says ‘future’. Anthea Gerrie pays a visit
Words Anthea Gerrie
As shocking as taking granny on a trip is Karim Rashid’s audacious infusion of an iconic Tel Aviv building with psychedelic colour and playfulness undreamed of in the city’s austere pre-war building boom. Then, it was one of thousands of buildings thrown up fast by refugee architects to accommodate legions of immigrants fleeing the Nazis.
Now The Poli House, where revolutionaries once fermented the battle for Israel’s independence, has reopened as the most high-concept hotel project yet by the world’s most flamboyant designer.
Built by award-winning Swiss architect Shlomo Liaskowski in 1934 and named for owner Yehuda Polishuk, The Poli House was rescued from dereliction by Nitza Smuk, the legendary conservation architect who won World Heritage status for the city’s unique Bauhaus and International-style buildings. She fought for 10 years to gain approval for the old office building to become a hotel with an extravagant rooftop entertaining space and a ground floor serving as a creative portal for the community.
No tired typology in The Poli House guest rooms. Photo Credit: Assaf Pinchuk
Rashid was brought in three years ago to give the interiors of the 80-year-old building dominating Magen David Square a 21st-century coat of many colours in a city more used to embracing its art-deco and modernist heritage. He felt the future was the only way to go for a metropolis rich in digital start-ups: ‘The mentality of Tel Aviv is very contemporary, focusing less on the past,’ says the multi-award-winning designer. ‘I tried to embrace that spirit, energy and love of life into the function of the hotel, turning an emotion into tangible form through colours and graphics.’
Colour certainly knocks you in the eye the minute you enter a street-side lobby dominated by a gigantic, L-shaped, canary-yellow, bespoke bar that serves as a welcome station. Guests revive here with an espresso, admiring Rashid’s graffiti wall before ascending to a rooftop check-in area where egg-shaped tub chairs are endowed, logically, with yolk-yellow upholstery.
Outside sits the hotel’s great glory: a rooftop deck and infinity pool that comes even more into its own after dusk, when coloured lights and ever-present sounds transform the space into an alfresco nightclub. There’s also a small spa at roof level and poolside tapas and cocktail service.
On the floors below, shades of blue and green predominate in rooms where the workspace has been ‘lightened up’ with a glass desk, and glass also carves out a discrete niche for bathroom and clothes storage. ‘I purposefully tried to break the tired typology of hotel room design,’ says Rashid.
A rooftop pool sits behind the hotel’s art-deco curves. Photo Credit: Aviva Kagan
Rooms and corridors dazzling the eye with op-art walls and floors lead to elevator shafts awash with mood lighting. While waiting for a lift, guests are bombarded with LED weather reports and news of daily happenings, running vertically and horizontally on the surrounding glass.
Smuk preserved the original staircase leading down to a ground floor that houses a bookstore - a nod to the clandestine press housed in the Polishuk Building during the pre-Independence days of guerilla warfare - and gallery space in which fashion, as well as art by the city’s growing ranks of creatives, is displayed.
Rashid, who says he has fallen in love with Tel Aviv’s energy, intellect and passion, sums up the whole project as ‘a pristine White City building juxtaposed with a digipop aura’, having striven to dress up the spare drama of the curvy facade that epitomises Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus architecture with ‘digitally driven ornamentation and form’. The digital generation will love it, even if Liaskowski and his granny are turning in their graves.
