About the Project
After submitting my Holy Island competition entry, something interesting happened in my practice. I got a phone call from a contractor I worked with on two architectural projects of mine in Tel Aviv, Rafi Dadush, who asked me to design the flat he had just bought in the southern part of the city next to the shore. That phone call took me back to Tel Aviv, and I was thrilled to be building yet again in Israel.
Dadush was a contractor with whom I built my second and fourth architectural jobs (Meiberg–Amir’s roof flat and a bigger, four-floor one family residential complex in Jaffa). Rafi’s flat was for his family (Susan his wife and two children in primary school). It was on the third floor of a modern apartment block in the southern part of Tel-Aviv. 90m2 flat; we started with keeping only the enveloping walls, and aimed at a fairly basic, modern family residential space layout, with an open kitchen/living area. It was designed in such a way that when somebody is at the entrance door he won’t see into the living room, the kitchen, or into any of the other rooms, despite the open plan.
The apartment block was in Zrubavel Street, which is perpendicular to the sea. It was the third building away from the sea shore. Therefore, if looking out through the balcony or some windows in certain angles you could see the sea. This was the starting point of the project: enable the great views from the sofa in the living room or from the bedroom while lying in bed.
The special features in this flat were that the long dividing curved wall had holes left open in it, in which we built a toilet room, sofa, shelf systems, fridge and a bathroom. These holes were designed and located in different heights depending on their function. Some of them felt as if they were hovering lightly above the floor, while others, such as the ones with the fridge and the main bathroom, were grounded more firmly. The southern balcony was left in its original place because by adding new glass doors it could be separated from the living or made into one space.
One of the main reasons that the clients liked this overall concept was to do with the fact that each insert – whether it was the sofa as part of the living room, or the extra toilet room – were located halfway into the living and bedroom, therefore only having half of their presence in the main rooms. This resulted in the main rooms feeling larger and more spacious. In addition to this, most of the flat was built by the client and so cheaper in the long run. The apartment’s colour scheme was inspired by a traditional Armenian tile that had been used in the bathroom: there was white, ochre and deep blue.
It was a pleasure to work with clients who basically let me do the design work, as I understood how to best fit - functionally and aesthetically - their brief. The contractor would measure the design’s success through its functionality and efficiency, though he reminded me often to contribute my architectural thinking to his brief. By having the sofa built into a hole with only half of its width visible would save space and money, as he would not have to buy a new sofa. Of course, the aesthetic reason for installing these ‘functional boxes’ into the wall was no less important: the different heights made the wall feel lighter and look more interesting. The ‘toilet box’ was particularly successful: most people were taken by surprise to find an extra toilet in a public space, but not really. It was ‘hanging’ on the wall (by cantilever) and was not at all overt about its function.
