English
By: Spencer Ho
Renowned Tel Aviv hotelier Leon Avigad loves the beach. He and his partner take their daughter to the beach just about every Friday and Saturday from March through November. He’ll only entertain moving to someplace like South Florida or Southern California. His retirement dream is to settle into a wardrobe of pastel pants and Tommy Bahama shirts and get fat in South Florida.
So when the purveyor of the Brown boutique hotel collection, took a look at the “uninspiring” beach hotel scene in his hometown of Tel Aviv, what he saw a downright depressing state of affairs. Where was the “real beach hotel” of his dreams “with a resort feel, fun music,” creative design and open atmosphere? Where was the life?
“On Ha-Yarkon no one is daring,” he said in an interview with Gear Patrol in 2014. “They all do blue because it’s on the beach and beige because of the sand… You can find interesting hotels inland. Exciting on the beach? Not really. They’re all afraid.”
It turns out his dream hotel was already in the back of his mind, and it came to fruition in mid-2014 because “afraid” is one characteristic that you wouldn’t attribute to Avigad, whose business card reads: “Bulldozer. Storyteller. Empresario.”
“I don’t want to just be your bedding solution,” he says. ”Some hotels advertise themselves like this, but I want to be your desire. I want to have enough spirit and guts and ambiance and panache.”
True to his word, he’s built his mini-empire on hard work and daring, working his way up from a bellboy to assistant general manager at the iconic Dan Tel Aviv Hotel in the 1990′s to launching his own consulting agency, Leopard Hospitality, in 2003, overseeing the transformation of Prima Music in Eilat just a year later in collaboration with one of Israel’s leading agencies and finally revolutionizing Tel Aviv’s hotel scene in 2010 with his company’s first solo project, Brown TLV urban boutique hotel.
Brown TLV
Located in an unassuming former office building along the seam between the upscale Rothschild Boulevard, the posh Neve Tzedek and the rough-around–the-edges Florentin, Brown TLV was the first hotel to tap into the city’s raw urban nature and combine it with a certain level of luxury and sophistication — in a sense, making it cool and sparking a renaissance for Tel Aviv’s urban areas that has seen boutique hotels pop up right and left faster than you can count.
Now, he’s brought that same “panache” to Tel Aviv’s coastline with a hotel only he could dream up.
Brown Beach House
Photo: Assaf Pinchuk
I feel like Dorothy. Everything just turned to color…”
– Don Draper, Mad Men
It’s an apt way to describe walking into Brown Beach House from the sizzling Middle Eastern streets of Tel Aviv on a wildly hot summer’s day. The bustling streets, the traffic, construction, commotion, dirt, litter – it all fades away when you walk through the doors and find yourself surrounded by fashion, luxury, service, nostalgia and, most of all, personality.
Like the worlds of the Wizard of Oz or Alice and wonderland, you feel almost as if you’ve walked into a fantasy realm somebody cooked up in the depths of their psyche, which in this case is Avigad’s.
The Beach House is certainly a departure from the “urban” motif of Brown TLV. The rooms and public spaces are more spacious, the colors are brighter and the atmosphere more bombastic, but in essence Avigad is trying to do the same thing for the Tel Aviv beachfront that he helped do for it’s urban areas — bring some excitement, some personality.
Photo: Assaf Pinchuk
“If the Brown Tel Aviv is more hipster, Brown Beach is more Frenchy – Gordon Beach meets Miami Beach meets Briggitte Bardot of the 60’s-70’s,” he says. “We wanted to reflect this happy, extrovert, outgoing fun that characterized this era.”
In terms of the property, it all starts with the Flamingo Bar at Brown Beach House. The lush rooms, the luxurious spa and the delectable restaurant — that’s all just gravy.
The Flamingo Bar is a microcosm of what the hotel is all about, a wonderful homage to beach vacations of days gone by and a place that gives you the feeling that you could be sipping rum Godfather II-style in Havana or doing something a little more illicit with Tony Montana in Miami Beach.
“This bar is packed every night with 250-300 people coming in and out, and this is what we love,” Avigad adds. “We love the sound of happy people clinking glasses. It’s what makes us alive.”
Photo: Assaf Pinchuk
The indoor section projects an immediate wow-factor – a towering ceiling and equally towering vintage interpretation of a classic 1950’s Playboy poster that immediately bring to mind scenes from 1970’s Miami Beach or Havana – but it’s also distinctly laid-back with sparse lounge-style seating, a bamboo bar, tropical ferns and a range of good-time music from “Club Med and vintage Bossanova to some 80’s disco, a little bit of Nancy Sinatra and a dash of James brown.”
Walk outdoors and you’re immediately greeted by a view of the Mediterranean straight ahead and to the right by a massive neon purple flamingo that seems destined to become an iconic piece of Tel Aviv’s beachfront. The neon hew of the flamingo definitely injects you with an urge to party, but the chill layout and enchanting view make it so you won’t be sorry for sitting around and yucking it up with friends.
Photo: Assaf Pinchuk
Much like the rooftop bar at Brown TLV, Brown Beach House has already become a smashing success by creating an atmosphere where “locals feel like tourists and tourists feel like locals,” according to Avigad.
“It’s important because if you go to a 100% American bar, then you don’t feel like you’re in Israel. Here you feel Russian and French and European and American, and we’ll have some Asian engineers or Indian technicians and Germans.”
The Beach House has been honing its finer points for the past 6 months during a soft opening and are set for an official opening in mid-January 2016 with all their ducks in a row.
“We want to really open the Brown Beach House in full with all the small details, Avigad says. “For instance, we have the Brown beach bag we designed, and it’s beautiful, but inside of it I want to have a beach umbrella and a chair that can fold into it, our own sun tan lotion, and matkot paddles and ball…
“Do you know what matkot is… I hate matkot, and my daughter is afraid, but it’s so Israeli that you have to have it.”
(Yeah, we know what matkot is, and we also hate it.)
“People who have life”
Ask Avigad, and he’ll tell you that his hotels are not necessarily for everybody. While on the pricier side, the hotel is not overly exclusive like a Waldorf Astoria, and you can enjoy it regardless of your age, origin, profession or family situation, but it takes a certain type of person to appreciate the concept and finer points of the hotel.
“Our hotels are for people who can afford $250-300 dollars a night, but they’d rather drive an Alfa Romeo than a Cadillac or BMW, for people who have life and enjoy life,” he says.
However, those pre-requisites have hardly narrowed Brown Beach Hotel’s clientele so far. For instance, alongside the young, foreign couples and singles you’d expect at such a hotel, locals have taken a surprising interest in it as well, with 10-15 percent of the guests being Israelis.
“They come here for the lifestyle experience, so they want it all. They’ll come early and ask us to store their luggage and walk around the town, and they’ll come at exactly 3:05 for check-in,” and then it’s non-stop the whole weekend.
“Tel Aviv is very carpe diem – do it right now because it might not be here tomorrow.”
Likewise, if you take a look at the lobby on any given day, you’ll even see a decent number of families with kids, and this isn’t a surprising development at all to Avigad.
“When you have kids, it doesn’t necessarily mean that this is it, get fat… You still want to go out, but don’t necessarily want to go out searching in a new city, so you want to stay at a hotel where you can just go down have a drink. And let’s stay at a hotel where you still have a good vibe and can feel young.”
“People with volume”
One of the tricks to completing the Brown Beach Experience is having a staff to match the hotel and its clientele, so Avigad is extra-particular with his hires and that’s reflected in the level of service.
“I want the 5-star professionalism without the stuffiness. I want our team members to be very open and warm and hospitable. The warmth is maybe the one thing I’m really focused on because when you’re traveling you don’t want to get a concierge who’s like, ‘I’m your concierge, if you don’t know what the Duomo is, then you shouldn’t have come to Milan.’”
“In Hebrew we call them people with volume. They’re usually in their 20’s or 30’s. They’ve traveled, they’ve experienced, they’ve seen the world a bit, they know what it’s like to be a guest.”
Perhaps even more so than the warmth, Avigad wants people who are as passionate about the hotel and Tel Aviv as he is.
“Look how beautiful and amazing this city is,” he extols. “Yes, it’s shabby; yes, it’s gray and yes, it’s rough around the edges, but it’s also creative, fun and buzzy. I want my concierge to really convey this to my guest and to be as enthusiastic about the city as us.
“Show me how passionate you are. That’s why most of our team members are non-Israelis. Like Ro My is from Austria and every day she wakes up enthusiastic, like ‘Oh my god! It’s the beach!’”
