While I was in Beirut, I stayed at the Villa Clara, an idiosyncratic hotel run by Olivier Gougeon, a French chef, and his wife, Marie-Hélene Moawad. The hotel, really a house from the 1920s, has just seven guest rooms, each decorated with antique furniture and paintings by local artists. The floors are covered with boldly patterned artisanal Lebanese tiles, most of them more than a century old, scooped up from houses also on the verge of destruction. The public rooms are full of aesthetic non sequiturs: There is an Andrée Putman table, hand-painted wallpaper in the restaurant, a sculptured pink flamingo and a set of chairs that had once occupied the French Senate. Each guest room is lit by a hand-blown Damascene chandelier, all purchased from the old souk of Damascus.

For people who prefer small hotels that require visitors to think about the city that surrounds them, Villa Clara is a treat. Most mornings, I woke to the sound of twin songbirds at my window, then gazed across the quiet, leafy street at a dilapidated villa, a remnant of the civil war that somehow seemed more like a Brutalist sculpture than a house. The surrounding neighborhood, Mar Mikhael, has the feel of Williamsburg in the 1970s, before it became a hipster theme park, when big rigs still rumbled through the streets at dawn. For every stylish bar and boutique that sells copies of Nylon magazine, there is an industrial machine shop, a tool warehouse or a company that wholesales lighting fixtures. Like many neighborhoods in Beirut, Mar Mikhael could be swallowed any day by the moneyed classes; for the moment, though, aided no doubt by the difficult economy and a general reluctance to travel to the region while so much of it is at war, young artists and writers can still afford to live and work there.

The food at Villa Clara is exceptional, particularly the breakfasts of homemade labneh, the thick Lebanese yogurt that has been strained to remove its whey, the freshly baked Levantine bread called manakish and the eggs from chickens raised in gardens that the couple rents from the Maronite Order in the nearby Chouf mountains. They cure their own ham in the cellars of the St. Jean Maron Monastery — which had been closed since the civil war. The hotel’s French restaurant is reliably considered to be among Beirut’s best (and most expensive). Gougeon, an ex-pastry chef at the Grand Véfour in Paris, arrived in Beirut in 1999, to work as a cook at the French Embassy. He soon realized there would be no turning back. “Here, there is total anarchy,” he explained, with a look of pleasure in his eyes. “Chaos. You have to fight on a daily basis for everything you get.” And like so many others I encountered, he regarded that daily struggle as a benefit rather than an obstacle. “In France everything is regimented,” he said. “There are hours and rules and long vacations. Here there are no days off. And very little rest. But we have something they no longer have: energy, desire and complete freedom.”

IT HAD BEEN NEARLY 20 years since I last visited Beirut. By then, the hostilities, which ground on mercilessly from 1975 to 1990, had turned the very name of the city into a synonym for war zone. More than a hundred thousand people died; a far greater number were ripped from their homes. Infrastructure — the telephone networks, the water system, roadways — and most of the economy had all been crippled.

By the 1990s, politics, war and hatred had run their course, at least for a while. It was the perfect moment for the emergence of Rafik Hariri, the blustery businessman who had moved to Saudi Arabia at the age of 21. Hariri entered the Saudi construction industry, advanced rapidly and was soon running his own firm, becoming the personal contractor for Prince Fahd. By the time he returned to Lebanon in 1992, to become the country’s prime minister, he was a billionaire.

Hariri set out at once to rebuild Beirut’s shattered urban center. An affable man who liked things to be big and shiny and new, he had little interest in sectarian fighting, but perhaps even less in preserving the essence of what many people had long regarded as the Middle East’s most alluring city.

Hariri, who was killed by a devastating truck bomb in 2005, loved yachts and planes and, more than anything else, enormous real estate projects, which is what the center of Beirut eventually became. To remake the city, he created a company called Solidere, which is a French acronym for the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of Beirut Central District. Squatters were removed from the city center, which was then essentially demolished. In addition, more than half a million square meters of land were reclaimed from the nearby sea.