The Ned Doha

When Qatar’s Ministry of Interior vacated William Sednaoui’s brutalist building in the 1970s, most assumed demolition was inevitable. Instead, Pritzker Prize-winner David Chipperfield transformed one of Doha’s oldest structures into a hotel where concrete waffle ceilings meet Murano chandeliers. The building now houses ninety rooms across just five floors, seven restaurants, and a members’ club where former government officials return as guests to close deals over cocktails in the very halls where they once shuffled paperwork.

The Ned brand’s own history made the pairing almost inevitable. Its first outpost occupies the former Midland Bank headquarters in London, a building that spent decades as a vault before becoming a bar. Doha got something stranger: a ministry building, not a bank, repurposed the same way, its bureaucratic corridors now hosting the kind of transactions that used to happen over a desk and a rubber stamp, minus the stamp.