Mr. Soof* Apartment Hotel is a new building in the Eilat landscape and the first of its kind in the southern city’s urban regeneration. Mr. Soof’s 28 apartments join the impressive boutique Apart-Hotel collection of TLV2GO, a company whose vision is to develop intriguing hospitality locations on ordinary city streets where, unlike a hotel stay, tourists and local holidaymakers can experience local life.

Mr. Soof is located on Eilat’s main thoroughfare – HaTmarim Boulevard (Dates in English, referring to the fruit of the palm tree). Eilat, while a part of Israel, has a color palette and climate uniquely its own, thanks to its location at the edge of the Red Sea and set against a surround of desert mountains that take on deep red hues as day turns to night.

In our approach to designing the holiday apartment interiors, we chose to use ideas not yet seen in Eilat: a visual palette that brings together the topography, the date palms, and a generous pinch of an inner city lifestyle.

To achieve this mood – a first for Eilat – we created three apartment archetypes based on the color palette of the fruit of the palm tree since dates undergo dramatic color change over the course of their growing season, turning gradually from green to ochre and then, like a good burgundy, becoming a deep reddish-brown, giving the three color themes used.

Offsetting the green, ochre or red color palettes, black and shades of brown have a statement to make too: kitchen and bathroom sanitaryware and accessories are made of or held in situ by black metal frames, while kitchenette units and bedroom closet doors are made of black wood whose computer-controlled cutouts create transparency and elegance. The headboards also play on the black and brown motif by blending both colors and different material textures into a pleasing whole with soft furnishings completing the mood.

The specially designed palm tree wallpaper, typically used on one wall in each of the apartments, tones in perfectly with the color palette chosen for that apartment archetype – whether green, ochre or deep burgundy red.

Given their sophisticated look, these apartments could be in Paris – not a style much seen in Eilat. Then again, many of the young people among the city’s earliest inhabitants came from Marseilles and other European points of departure. The whiff of European elegance they brought then was lost over the years. Mr. Soof and its designers are pleased to bring their design ethos back to Eilat and to reinstate the cosmopolitan look of a bygone era.

* Soof, the Hebrew name of the Red Sea, probably arises from the red reeds (soof) that bloom on the shores of the Red sea.