Reading Chris’s review of the Icon Chairs app reminded me of an experience I had on a trip to Israel last spring. On my last night in Jerusalem, my traveling companions and I found a dingy little hole of a bar where some of the local experimental artists and party kids hung out. Finally, what we’d been searching for the past few days. Here, we chatted with a young rug vendor in the Old City who explained that many of those tourist shop stalls winding through the Stations of the Cross served as fronts for unsavory activity. I also met a strangely beautiful elfin woman who was part of a collective that, through funding from the city, opened a pop-up ceramics and arts-related shop in an abandoned mall. I asked her to take me on an adventure.

She shuttled me to an even more obscure bar/records-and-zines shop, where everyone was reading a book while extremely harsh noise music screeched and crunched in speakers around us. After a glass of wine, she and a couple of her friends offered to walk me back to the luxurious sanctuary of the Mamilla, where I was staying. I was thinking perhaps there’d be a little romance with her—she was adorable, charming, and thoroughly weird, and I was staying in an extremely gorgeous room with a tub the size of a tomb—but no. “May I see the room with the chairs?” she asked.

The Mamilla is a posh and slightly mysterious building on the edge of Old Jerusalem. Moshe Safdie and Piero Lissoni conceptualized it to honor traditional elements of the city while also incorporating contemporary flare. I don’t think I’ve ever stayed somewhere more beautiful. The whole interior twinkles with such a genteel reverence for itself that calling it a hotel feels crass.

Of course, fabulous sites such as this do not welcome the public, especially a tattered public with their dirty bikes wandering in at 2 AM. I had to stare down the security guards and demand they let my friends in. I’m not trying to call Mamilla out on practices of exclusivity; it’s especially important in a place like Jerusalem, where conflict and violence is embedded in the land’s history, to enforce security, even if it felt completely safe while I was there. Plus, US Mideast Envoy Ambassador George Mitchell was a guest at the time, and anyone official like that always comes with a cadre of scrutinizing men in black.

It turned out the “room with the chairs” was a section off the grand dining area downstairs, an enormous table around which was situated one each of a dozen icons: the Tulip, Panton, Zig Zag, Louis 20, Valet. Upon sight of what seemed to me a tableau you might find at any given upscale loft in Soho or Tribeca, she and her companions each gasped in delight. They caressed the furniture piece by piece, taking turns sitting in each chair in total admiration and delight, sharing with one another bits of knowledge about how each one was made.

I know little to nothing about modern furniture design. I can recognize the good stuff when I see it, but as for a piece’s history and architecture, I got close to zilch. So I felt extremely guilty that I, a visitor to their home, was the one granting access to this thrill—and to be honest, I wasn’t that impressed. Which made me feel even guiltier. So compounded was the shame that I couldn’t bring myself to take a photo because I felt like that would be mocking them.

Jerusalem is a city of extreme tradition, so much so that it’s mandated that all buildings wear a facade of the same white stone supposedly sourced from the outlying Judean desert. To even have access to modernity is a luxury. This is one lesson I took home with me. And little effort though it may be, I just downloaded that chairs app so I could learn a thing or two about appreciation.

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