Umam Documentation and Research houses the bulk of its documents chronicling the history of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) in Villa Slim, one of the last remaining historic mansions in the Southern Suburbs of Beirut. Efforts to remake this house as the physical base for this archive, devoted to preserving memories of the war in order to highlight alternative interpretations of the conflict’s history, dovetail with the way the organization employs nostalgia and stories of the space to figuratively [re]create what is presented as a secular, more inclusive identity in the present. The house seems to invite an imaginative engagement with the past as a space apart from the dominating social milieu of Al-Dahiyeh (Arabic for “suburbs”), which is often described as home to “Hezbollah’s stronghold,” as well as the majority of greater Beirut’s Shi’a population. The area is largely identified with this particular sectarian profile, much like how accounts of what happened during the civil war break down along sectarian lines, as there is no official state narrative. To those involved with Umam D&R, Villa Slim represents a different sort of place: one where memory “flashes up,” giving a glimpse of the numerous futures that could be. More than longing for a bygone Lebanon devoid of sectarianism, this nostalgia creates a way of feeling the past in the present that opens the possibility of resisting totalizing narratives both of national history and of place. This paper will address the way that the everyday experience of working in the archive constitutes place and history in post-war Lebanon. A descriptive analysis of Villa Slim itself and an ethnographic engagement with the tales told about it by the organization’s founders and staff will show how place-based nostalgia is inscribed and reimagined in the organization’s approach to memory and the civil war. The portrayal of the house as historically unique in these stories is part of a process of remembering that reimagines Villa Slim’s role in the present, much as the archive reimagines history in contemporary Lebanon to include disparate accounts of the past.