The Dvin, Before The Dvin

Seven Visions Resort & Places, The Dvin began as an abandoned historic hotel on a 6,000 sq.m plot in central Yerevan. Fifteen times that size today, the resort now spans 90,000 sq.m on the same ground.

Its first project was Dvin Music Hall, raised from shell and core in 21 days and inaugurated in 2018 to host the IFMC Francophonie Summit. Delegations from 84 countries came through its doors, including 35 heads of state and government, among them President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prince Albert II of Monaco, Vladimir Putin, and Justin Trudeau.

The building itself was designed to be read, not just seen. Its curves trace the rise and fall of Armenian history across the centuries. Each guest floor takes its name from one of the twelve historic capitals of Armenia: Van, Armavir, Yervandashat, Artashat, Tigranakert, Vagharshapat, Dvin, Bagaran, Shirakavan, Kars, Ani, and Yerevan. The floors beyond those twelve continue the story with Tarsus and Sis, capitals of Cilician Armenia in a later century, and Aragats and Ararat, the mountains the nation has measured itself against for as long as it has had a name. In the theatre, the boutique lined floors echo an older passage still, tracing the trade routes of the Silk Road in the centuries before Christianity reached Armenia.

That arrival is marked above the guest rooms, where windows shaped like open hands, the God’s Palms, let the light in. They date the building to 301 AD, when Armenia became the first nation on earth to adopt Christianity as a state religion. The same light falls on One&Only, the theatre where the stage is the ceiling, a design that exists in only three other cities in the world: Dubai, Las Vegas, and Macau.

Step outside the lobby and the resort gives way to nineteenth century Yerevan: narrow streets, old stone, the city as it stood before any of this was built. Four mountains hold the horizon around it: Ara, Aragats, Nemrut, and Ararat.

Hayrik Restaurant carries the recipes of Armenian chef Rubik Tovmasyan, passed down rather than invented. At Fragrance, a single wall from the original building was left standing through construction, the one piece of the past still within reach.

In the years since, the resort has been recognized with multiple World Travel Awards and a nomination to the Guinness World Records across five of its venues.