Habibi Beach Blog

Bricklaying Egyptian style.

This space will form the entrance hall, with the restaurant on the left and the reception offices on the right. The beach is in the background of the shot.

No, not an incorrectly placed wall but a large pile of bricks.

The rooms, freshly plastered (with one coat) and one with the PVC coating ready for a second coat.


There’s been quite a lot of progress on the Berrylands Hotel up at Habibi beach, as these photos from late October show. The 24 rooms have now all received a coat of plaster inside and out, and are beginning to look something like the hotel rooms they will become in the new year. A huge area of land between the rooms and the beach has been flattened and raised up, ready for the planting of the gardens, construction of the windsurf centre and beach bar, and the sinking of the swimming pool. But most significantly, the walls of the hotel reception and restaurant are now going up.

There’s now a team of builders living and working at the site and progress is, finally, actually pretty rapid. The estimated completion date of the build is still end of January 2009 – but as anyone who’s watched the program ‘Grand Designs’ will know, even in Europe these dates really are just estimates. In Egypt we’re beginning to suspect they’re more like figures plucked hopefully from the air! However, if progress does continue at the pace that work is currently happening – well, an opening date of early 2009 is certainly possible. We’ll keep you posted here on the Habibi blog!