There are nightclubs, and then there is B 018. Sunk into the earth of Beirut’s Karantina district, invisible from the street, its retractable roof sealed shut like a wound in the ground — it could be a bunker, a tomb or an underground hedonistic escape. It has, in its time, been all three things to different people. Renowned for its outlandish design and the history of the land it occupies, we take a unique look at the nightclub that became the unlikely soul of a city.

Photos: DW5 // Bernard Khoury

A Tale Untold

It’s often said that war is a million miles away when the Lebanese begin to dance. This statement couldn’t have been truer when musician Naji Gebran started hosting musical therapy sessions in the ‘80s at his seaside apartment located 18 kilometers north of Beirut.

“They used to come because of the music, to forget the war,” says Gebran. To the tunes of jazz, blues, funk, soul, classical and Arabic music, people who weren’t able to live their dreams would dance them instead. Soon, these therapy sessions were referred to as B 018, an ode to the serial number of the beach chalet hosting them.

It wasn’t long before the big success of Gebran’s musical therapy nights led to an overflow of dancing dreamers and the party required a larger venue. In 1994, the club found its new location — while maintaining its old reference, B 018 — in Beirut’s Sin el Fil neighborhood.

The site, which had no permit, could only be reached via a dirt road and quickly developed a reputation for its unorthodox atmosphere. In the same year, Gebran’s cousin Bernard Khoury arrived from Harvard University bursting with creativity, and it is he, Lebanon’s visionary architect, who made the club irrevocably disappear from the surface.

B 018 made its home, where it stands today, in what resembles an underground bomb shelter just east of Beirut in 1998. Khoury’s rather wondrous coffin-shaped design for the club, accessed via a metal staircase, was inspired by the dark history of its grubby Karantina location.

Here, on Lot #317, local militia massacred Kurdish and Palestinian refugees in January 1976. Faced with the dilemma of creating a venue of pleasure against a grim backdrop, Khoury sunk his project in the ground, like a communal grave. Leaving the surface of the area to its doomed past, he added a retractable roof made of heavy metal, giving revelers an unparalleled experience of dancing under Beirut’s night sky.

“The energy we injected into this sector is in my opinion far more worthy than what a postwar rhetorical monument could provide,” Khoury said in an earlier interview.

For 20 years, B 018 had put Lebanese nightlife on the map, cementing Beirut as the MENA region’s party capital and being voted among the world’s best nightclubs by Wallpaper magazine three years running.

Gebran said: “The prizes and awards for B 018 proved that my dream came true: to change the musical scene in Lebanon, for the better.”

By the late 2010s, the venue was showing its age. In September 2018, the club held a final night — “One Last Dawn” — before closing for renovation, following the arrival of new partners. However, the reopening was brief. In August 2020, the Beirut port explosion devastated the surrounding district, virtually wiping out the area. Miraculously, B 018 survived almost intact, its bunker design once again proving its worth.

As Lebanon’s economic crisis deepened, the venue continued to operate intermittently, its legendary status intact even as the country around it struggled with currency collapse, fuel shortages and political paralysis. A Dubai outpost opened in late 2021, framed as an act of cultural preservation, but the Karantina original remained the heart of the brand. The club is now set to reopen in mid-June 2026, returning to its original concept — reconnecting with the raw, underground spirit that made it famous in the first place. It’s a homecoming, of sorts, for a venue that has outlasted it all.