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The former Ministry of Interior in Doha at dusk, a long concrete cantilever lit from below over a dark colonnade, with palms in front of it

Inspection · Doha, Qatar

The Ned Doha

The old Ministry of Interior on the Corniche, kept and reopened as ninety rooms, seven restaurants and a members' club. Doha has no shortage of glass towers. This one was already standing.

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I arrived at four in the morning, which is how a lot of people arrive in Doha, and the building was the first thing that registered. You come in under a concrete cantilever the length of a street, lit from below, with the colonnade running away into the dark on both sides. It does not look like a hotel. It looks like what it was, which is a ministry, and nobody has tried to soften that.

What the building was

This was the Ministry of Interior, designed by the Lebanese architect William Sednaoui, and it is one of the serious pieces of early modern architecture in this city. The conversion was led by David Chipperfield Architects. They kept the concrete frame, added a floor on top, put gardens and water around it and dropped new pavilions into the grounds, and the result is that a government block now works as somewhere to spend an evening. The interiors are by Soho House Design and they go hard at the nineteen-seventies: terrazzo, marble, burl wood, amber glass, heavy weaves. The contrast is the whole idea. Concrete outside, and inside, warmth laid on thickly enough to carry it.

The lobby at The Ned Doha, a floor of inlaid marble in a radiating star pattern, a round table with pink flowers under a glass chandelier and curved white sofas
The lobby floor is a marble star you walk across to check in. Look down before you look up.
An internal atrium at The Ned Doha seen from an upper balcony, galleries running round it and orange seating on the floor below
From the gallery above. The ministry's own section, with the furniture of a club dropped into it.
A stairwell at The Ned Doha from directly above, the square flights running down around a lit well with striped carpet
The stair, straight down. Somebody carpeted a civil service stairwell and it works.

It helps that the design answers the architecture's own period. A hotel that sets itself in the nineteen-seventies inside a building from any other decade is doing a costume. Here the two agree, and the place holds together because of it.

The thirty metre pool at The Ned Doha in daylight with the full concrete facade of the former ministry standing over the far end, striped loungers down both sides and festoon lights strung overhead
The building from the far end of the pool. A ministry, a colonnade, and a swimming pool where the car park would have been.

The rooms

There are ninety of them and they are the quietest part of the hotel, which is correct. The ceilings are the original coffered concrete, restored and left visible, so the structure is in the room with you. Everything underneath it is soft: a shell-shaped headboard in velvet, burl cabinets, deep carpet, amber glass overhead. The bathrooms have had real money spent on them and do not read as an afterthought.

A bedroom at The Ned Doha with a tan velvet shell headboard, a ribbed bed base and a round burl table, under a coffered concrete ceiling and an amber glass chandelier
Four in the morning, first room. The ceiling is the building and the rest is upholstery.
An open burl wood cabinet in a room at The Ned Doha holding glasses, a coffee machine, a teapot and two cups
The cabinet opens into a small bar. Good glass, and a coffee machine that works at four.
A bathroom at The Ned Doha with deep blue walls, a freestanding white tub and a graphic black and cream marble floor
The bathrooms are a colour and a floor pattern, and both are decisions.

The larger categories open up into a sitting end with a curved sofa and glass down to the floor, which at this latitude is the difference between a room you leave in the morning and one you come back to at two. Worth naming the category when you book. The names do the work here.

The sitting end of a suite at The Ned Doha with a curved green sofa, a scalloped travertine table, an arc lamp and walnut panelling, the glass running the full width
The sitting end of a suite. The table is one piece of travertine cut like a flower.
A bedroom at The Ned Doha with a grey velvet shell headboard, patterned cushions and a woven bedcover, a shaded lamp beside it
A second category, same shell, different colour. They are consistent about this.
A bathroom vanity at The Ned Doha in rose marble with an oval brass mirror above it and a deep blue wall behind
Rose marble and a brass oval. Nobody needed to do this and somebody did.

The part I would want to know before booking

Over two nights I changed rooms more than once, because I could smell cooking in the bedroom. My guess is that it travels through the ventilation. That is a guess and it stayed a guess, because nobody could show me the cause and I could not find it myself. I am more sensitive to this than most people, and I am aware that for a lot of travellers it would not register at all.

It matters to me because the whole appeal of a house like this is that you can eat seven different ways without leaving the building. I want the kitchens downstairs and I want them to stay downstairs. I have met this in other hotels with large dining operations and it is not unique to Doha. It did not undo what I liked here. It did make the stay take more managing than it should have, and leaving it out would make this page less useful than it ought to be.

The ground floor

Seven restaurants, and they are not amenities attached to a hotel. Cecconi's does northern Italian, Kaia is Asian-Pacific, Electric Diner is American and open late, Malibu Kitchen is Californian in an outdoor room that is nonetheless air conditioned, Hadika is Lebanese and built for mezze at a long table, and Millie's Lounge runs all day. There is a stage, and there is live music on it.

The dining room at Cecconi's in The Ned Doha, dark green marble walls hung with pictures, teal chairs and white linen under a glass chandelier
Cecconi's, before service. Green marble to the ceiling and the pictures hung close.
A lounge at The Ned Doha with blue velvet tub chairs, a pink banquette and potted plants on a patterned marble floor
One of the lounges off the main floor. You can sit here for two hours and nobody minds.
A bar at The Ned Doha with orange globe lights on a brass stem, dark wood columns and a boldly patterned carpet
The carpet is doing a lot and the room can take it.

Wherever a kitchen puts pizza on the menu I order one, because it is a quick way of finding out how seriously a place takes the thing it did not have to do. I ran the test here, indoors at Cecconi's, in the green marble room. The margherita was a decent plate and I finished it, and next time I would spend the course on something else. Call that a pass without a recommendation.

What this arrangement buys you is an evening that moves. You are not booking a table in a hotel restaurant and then going back upstairs. You cross the floor two or three times and the room changes each time, and some of the people around you live in this city and have come here to see each other. That is unusual in a capital where the good hotel restaurants mostly sit on the fiftieth floor behind their own lift.

Outside

The grounds are the part the renderings never get right. There are pavilions under scalloped canopies, a garden you walk through to get between them, planting that has been allowed to grow, and terraces looking across the water to West Bay. In December it was perfect at two in the afternoon, which is the whole argument for coming to Doha in winter.

An outdoor restaurant at The Ned Doha under a canopy of overlapping pale scallops, with slatted timber armchairs, potted trees and a terrazzo floor
The canopy is made of scallops laid over each other, and it throws the light around all afternoon.
A garden seating area at The Ned Doha under deep concrete beams, with low sofas, banana plants and a patterned stone floor
A garden room under the beams. Deep shade, which is the local currency.
A terrace at The Ned Doha with green and white striped chairs around a dark table, the towers of West Bay on the skyline beyond the wall
From the terrace you can see the other Doha, the one with all the towers in it.
The pool at The Ned Doha at night, lit turquoise under strings of festoon lights, with a long run of green and white striped daybeds along the near side and the concrete colonnade above
Half past six, with the lights on. This is the hour the hotel was designed for and it is worth planning an evening around.

Breakfast, which turned out to be the best of it

I will take good coffee over most things a hotel can offer me, and the coffee here is good. Breakfast is at Millie's, with a counter of pastries along the marble and a kitchen cooking to order behind it, and it runs late enough that the four in the morning arrival is survivable. The fresh watermelon juice became a routine: one at breakfast, one at lunch, both days.

A marble counter at The Ned Doha laid with rows of croissants and sesame rolls on wire racks, a cook working at the pass behind
The pastry counter at Millie's. They come out of the kitchen behind it and they are warm.
A breakfast table from above at The Ned Doha with croissants, avocado toast with a poached egg, coffee and a glass of watermelon juice on dark marble
Breakfast, with the watermelon juice. I ordered that every time it was going.
A cup of coffee on a saucer beside a dark green card printed with The Ned, on a breakfast table
The coffee. In a hotel with seven kitchens this is the thing I judge it on.

Somewhere in the Middle East a long time ago I stopped treating the juice list as a consolation and started reading it as the drinks list, and places like this reward that. The watermelon was the best thing in a glass all week.

Advisor's perspective

The Ned Doha is for someone who likes buildings and wants a hotel with other people's evenings going on inside it. The ministry gives it weight that a new build cannot buy, the restaurants and the music give it noise, and the pool gives it an afternoon. Against that, the smell in the bedroom cost me two room changes in two nights and I will not pretend otherwise.

It is not on Classic Travel, so there is no programme rate here and no credit to attach. It books through me, which in this case is more useful than it sounds: the question of what your rate includes at the club and the spa has a real answer, and it is worth getting that answer in writing before you pay for anything.

A rolled green and white striped pool towel with The Ned embroidered on it in rust thread
The towel by the pool, with the name stitched into the stripe. The small things here are all finished.

Before you book

The questions people send me about The Ned Doha.

Where is it, and is that a good part of Doha to stay in?
It is on the Corniche side of the old civic centre, a short walk from the Amiri Diwan and the Grand Mosque, with the Museum of Islamic Art and Souq Waqif both close. That puts you in the administrative and cultural heart of the city and away from the hotel towers of West Bay, which you can see across the water from the terraces. If you want to walk the Corniche in the morning and be in the souq in the evening, this is the right side of town. If your idea of Doha is the skyline and you want to be inside it, West Bay is the address and I will say so.
What was the building before it was a hotel?
The Ministry of Interior, designed by the Lebanese architect William Sednaoui, and one of the significant pieces of Doha's early modern architecture. The conversion was led by David Chipperfield Architects, who kept the concrete frame and added an upper floor, landscaped grounds, water and new pavilions. The interiors are by Soho House Design and they are frankly nineteen-seventies: terrazzo, marble, burl wood, heavy fabrics, amber glass. The hotel opened in mid-November 2022, in time for the World Cup, so by the time I stayed it had had two years to settle.
Which room should I book?
The rooms run from small to large across ninety of them and the differences are real, so book by category and not by price. What they share is the coffered concrete ceiling, which is the best thing in any of them, and bathrooms that have had the same money spent on them as the bedrooms. The larger categories give you a sitting end with a curved sofa and glass to the floor. Given what I say above about the kitchens, tell me when you book that you are sensitive to cooking smells, and I will put it in writing to the hotel before you arrive. I cannot point you at a floor or a category that avoids it, because nobody could point me at one either.
Do I get into Ned's Club and the spa?
This is the question to ask before booking and the one most people skip. The Ned is a hotel, a set of public restaurants and a private members' club in the same building, and access is not uniform across the three. The spa upstairs has treatment rooms, sauna, steam and a hammam, and Ned's Club Upstairs is a rooftop lounge looking over West Bay and the Amiri Diwan. Confirm in writing which of those your rate includes, especially if you book through a third party, because the hotel's own booking terms distinguish some of it. I would not assume the rooftop comes with the room.
What is breakfast like?
It was the best part of my stay and I did not expect to write that. Breakfast is at Millie's Lounge, which runs all day, with a counter of pastries and a kitchen that cooks to order, and the coffee is properly good, which in a hotel of this size is not a given. The thing I kept going back for was fresh watermelon juice, cold, at breakfast and again at lunch. In this part of the world I pay more attention to what is in the glass than I would elsewhere, and that one was the easy favourite of the trip.
Can you book it through Classic Travel?
No, and I checked it properly. The Doha listing on the portal prints every property Classic Travel sells in the city on one page, twenty of them, and The Ned is not on that list. So there is no agent rate, no breakfast attached and no credit, and anybody who promises you those for this hotel is guessing. It books through me directly: I write to the house, name your dates and the category, ask about club and spa access in the same message, and come back to you with what they actually say.

Something else you want to know? Write to me and I will answer it here.

A pair of white trainers from above on a floor of inlaid marble rectangles in cream, ochre and grey Inside a poolside cabana at The Ned Doha, timber frame, scalloped fabric walls, green and white striped cushions and a green ceramic stool A margherita pizza with a basil leaf on a white plate, the green marble dining room out of focus behind it A burgundy panelled room with a tall cascading crystal chandelier over pale curved armchairs and a mosaic floor A burger with a fried egg on a plate beside a metal cup of fries, on a red leather banquette table A long row of striped poolside loungers seen end on, with clipped hedges and the concrete colonnade beyond

Arranged by hand

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