Hotel living

This woman made the leap and moved into Jerusalem’s Leonardo Plaza Hotel, redecorating the apartment to fit her personal tastes.

By GLORIA DEUTSCH
Living room (photo credit: Courtesy)
Living room
(photo credit: Courtesy)
It can’t be easy to downsize from a 250-square-meter apartment in Rehavia to 65 sq.m. in an apartment hotel, but this is what the 73-yearold owner of this place did.
A recently widowed French woman who divides her time between Jerusalem and Paris, she had to dispose of many loved items of furniture and choose which of her antique pieces to keep. She also had to dispose of all her linens and towels, as these are provided by the hotel.
She chose Jerusalem-based interior designer David Zylbermann to help her redecorate the new home and discovered he was much more than a designer. With their shared French background and love of antiques, he was able to create her new home in the spirit she wanted. Following his advice, she bought the apartment on the eighth floor of the Leonardo Plaza Hotel in Jerusalem, which looks out onto the Great Synagogue opposite.
“It’s not easy redecorating in a hotel,” says Zylbermann, whose work is especially popular in the French expat community. “You can’t start work until 9:30 a.m.
and must stop between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., and it’s hard to bring up materials with parking problems in the hotel.”
He concedes, however, that this is a blessing for the people who actually live there, though the work took three months rather than the month he had anticipated.
He knocked down some walls, too, joining the two separate balconies off the lounge and study into one, and changing the three bathrooms so that one became the kitchen, one just a shower room and the third able to fit a washing machine and dryer.
ALTHOUGH THE people living in hotel apartments often eat in the dining room, the owner of this apartment wanted a proper kitchen rather than the small cooking corner provided, and Zylbermann was able to create one from one of the bathrooms.
“With only one small window, we didn’t want to make anything heavy or dark, so we chose a blond wood-look formica and a marble table top,” explains the designer.
A clinical look is avoided with decorative transfers on the walls and a continuation of the lounge wallpaper, a huge flower Art Nouveau design that he tells me comes from Belgium and is rather expensive – so much so that it is used only on one wall per room. Still, it is very effective.
He decided to base the whole color scheme of the apartment on bronze for two reasons.
“I felt it was the best color to put with all the antique pieces we saved,” he says, “and it turned out she had many decorative bronze items she didn’t even realize she had.”
The lounge carpet is beige, which they felt was good with the bronze motif, but the sofa and footstool she already had were blue, and the easy chairs a slightly different shade of beige. To bring it all together, he was able to find a picture that he felt suited the owner both artistically and spiritually, and he placed it over the sofa.
“It is one of a series of photographs of the 12 violins which were found and saved in Auschwitz,” he tells me. “They were brought together for a concert in Jerusalem in 2008, a charitable evening in aid of [soup kitchen] Meir Panim, and a famous French photographer took a series of 12 photographs with 50 numbered copies of each. I felt that as the owner was a music lover and also French, the photo would be appropriate.”
Lighting plays an important role in this apartment.
“We lowered all the ceilings and added cornices, and put ceiling lights into both,” says Zylbermann. “I used LED lighting everywhere, and I like it for several reasons. It uses very little electricity, as you know, but you can also change the angle of the lens and alter the direction of the light.
You can also choose the degree of white or yellow and use a remote control to get exactly the light you want.”
In the study, a delicate, horizontally striped curtain covers the window with a bronze-colored drape, toning in with the wallpaper and a large bronze vase he found among her multitude of possessions.
The theme is continued in the bedroom, with the bronze and gold side lamps and the flowery bedspread reflecting the bronze of the walls and the silver-blue of the headboard and the carpet.
“For her it is a tranquil and pretty retreat,” he says.
Most of all, the owner is happy to come back from a trip to Paris to her cozy apartment, and not the huge empty Rehavia place she left behind.