Fashion designerReem Acra has a talent for seeing a finished product in raw materials. She uses it when she designs a dress for the red carpet. And she used it when she bought an apartment in the skeleton of a bombed-out, 19th-century building near downtown Beirut.  In the living room of Lebanese fashion designer Reem Acra, bold color mixes with patterned wallpaper.  "Beirut is where I was born and raised. I wanted a place where I could come back and visit," says Ms. Acra, who is known for designing evening gowns for celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Eva Longoria, Jennifer Lopez, Kristen Stewart and Katherine Heigl. "I wanted to take the past and make it modern. I wanted a New York style, and a blending of the East and West."  Ms. Acra's spacious one-bedroom pied-à-terre—roughly 2,400 square feet—is in Saifi Village, a small, upscale, mixed residential and commercial area near downtown with some of the highest real-estate prices in Lebanon. It stands apart from Beirut's concrete jungle of high-rises with its low, pastel-painted buildings with red tile roofs, and tree-lined streets.  The district is sometimes criticized for being too sterile and exclusive—an endless debate in Beirut's reconstruction after its 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. The war's effects are still seen today in a divided society, weak infrastructure and a steady brain drain of some of its most educated citizens.  Inside Ms. Acra's apartment, the large rooms with tall windows and high ceilings open into one another, a part of the New York loft style she wanted to bring to Beirut. What is most striking, however, is the home's rich color scheme. The walls of the living room are orange with gray patterned wallpaper; the kitchen and dining-room walls are two shades of dark blue; and a bright-green velvet sofa is in view of all three rooms.  Despite such bold color choices, the apartment is minimal in its furnishings—a reflection of its size, Ms. Acra's background in fashion design and a certain fastidiousness about having objects in their place. "Nothing here doesn't mean something. I didn't want to overwhelm the place with things," she says.  All of her decorations have a story—from family heirlooms with more sentimental than material value, to memories of her early days as a fashion designer, the centerpiece of which is the Plexiglas dining-room table embedded with blocks of fabric from her elaborate 1990s designs.  On a mantle sits hardened tree bark, a reminder of her childhood spent going to the mountains with her three brothers and her parents to collect amber. Upon returning, her father, who was chairman of the public-health department at the American University of Beirut, would spend hours polishing the transparent stone to use in research.  Fabric also plays a big role in the décor. Some of Ms. Acra's earliest memories are of shopping for material with her mother in the Beirut markets. Lining the walls are framed samples of Turkish textiles. Her large orange bedroom, with an en suite marble bathroom, has long, red shades. "I wanted the bedroom to have a feeling of a tent," she says. "I thought the color orange would bring that sort of romantic light into it and give it the feeling of a sunset lighting inside the tent."  Ms. Acra, who declines to give her age, has four other homes: another in Beirut, two in New York and one in Nashville, Tenn., where her mother and a brother now live. (Her other two brothers live in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.) She comes back to Beirut only a couple of days at a time, but when she does she immerses herself in her home. She has her first coffee at 8 a.m. and doesn't stop moving until the end of the day, when she starts entertaining from the late evening through the early hours. That means she often gets no sleep during her stays. She doesn't seem to mind her all-nighters in the Lebanese capital, happy to savor her time in her hometown.  "As soon as I walk in the door I turn on music—jazz, [Lebanese singer] Fairuz or country. This is where I can dream, relax and think," she says. On this latest trip, she stopped by one of her favorite shops, where she was delighted the vendor remembered her. She is now planning to surprise her mother by refurbishing an old makeup stool she recently found while going through family treasures.  Ms. Acra grew up by the Mediterranean near Beirut's old lighthouse. Situated near the American University of Beirut, the area is still a center for the intelligentsia. Education and hard work were instilled in Ms. Acra at an early age; her father acted as a mentor to many students, who often visited their home.  Both her mother and father encouraged their children to study in the U.S., something Ms. Acra says is unusual for parents in the region to want for their daughters.  In 1983, Ms. Acra headed to Manhattan to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology and bought her first home in Chelsea. She began dressing celebrities early in her career. One defining moment for Ms. Acra was when Halle Berry wore a dress she designed for the Golden Globes in 2003.  It was during a trip to Beirut around 1999 that she heard about the renovation of an old building, and sought to buy it. It was a project of Solidere, the real-estate development company responsible for the renovation of Saifi Village between 1998 and 2000.  Ms. Acra says she paid a very low price for her unit, which was uninhabitable at the time. According to figures by Ramco, a Beirut-based real-estate, consulting and brokerage firm, purchasing in Saifi Village now costs about $465 to $560 per square foot, which would value Ms. Acra's apartment at somewhere between $1.1 million and $1.3 million.  After buying the home, Ms. Acra planned to turn the three-bedroom into a two-bedroom, then decided to create a one-bedroom, with a small sitting room for guests, to allow a feeling of spaciousness. She also insisted that Solidere return the original arches over the windows that they had removed.  After the building was renovated, it took Ms. Acra six years to find the right items to fill the apartment. A perfectionist, she adds something only if it's right. If not, she doesn't mind waiting. Opening the front door with a key, she says, "I still haven't found the right doorknob."  A version of this article appeared June 21, 2013, on page M5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Eye for Beirut's Potential Beauty.
The fashion designer builds a home in a Beirut building destroyed during the war, and fills it—sparingly—with bold colors, tentlike drapes and items from her family that each tell a story from her childhood.