The German Colony was established in 1868, being the first modern neighborhood in Haifa. Its main road, today Ben-Gurion Boulevard was nominated in 2008 as an UNESCO World Heritage Site for the Bahai Gardens rising uphill. Since this beatiful area has been preserved and renewed it has become Haifa’s main leisure district.

We designed a new 300 room hotel on a former bus terminal plot. The design challenge was how to fit such large building mass in this historic context. Our concept was to break the scale of the facade along the Colony streets to be similar to the historic vocabulary, i.e. three floor seperate stone buildings with tiled roofs – while most of the volume, up to 6 floors, is set behind. In between, inner courtyard is the main hotel open space.

Finishes introduce accordingly complement and contrast between the stone cladding around and white aluminum panel whth glass curtain walls in the inner and back facades.