At first thought, a new 10,000 square-meter gated community might seem like the last thing an already overcrowded Beirut needs. But the forthcoming Bella Casa, by MENA Capital, takes a different approach to sequestered living. Instead of avenues lined with cookie-cutter tract homes, Bella Casa will feature three residential towers of small and medium-sized apartments, spacious lofts and penthouses, while leaving roughly 8,000 square meters for communal space. Nabil Sawabini, chairman of MENA Capital, says: “When we started about five years ago, our focus was on the high-end market because there was a genuine demand for that kind of product.” Times have changed, he adds, and buyers are now looking for smaller, more practical living spaces: “We started to notice just over a year ago that there was a shift towards medium to smaller-sized apartments, and the shift was principally because the price-per-square-meter went up considerably. People simply could not
