In the heart of the bustling city of Tel Aviv, on a 225 sqm, 9-meter narrow plot, we created an urban green dream for a family of five.
One person wanted a lap pool to swim in, another wanted a luscious natural wild garden, the grown-up kids wanted their own space and everyone wanted to create a sense of home and being together.
The planning concept was to treat the boundaries of the plot – the external fence walls – as the actual external house walls. The main living area is enclosed by glass, extending a wraparound view to the plot borders, which invites the outside greenery inside the house. The surrounding fruit trees and garden maintains privacy, from being overlooked by the nearby buildings - indeed, they are an architectural "material" of their own.
The pool carves through the house and partially roofed by the second floor, takes part in this indoor-outdoor experience and can be viewed from the living area. Even the stairs (a significant, blue-colored feature) hover over the pool, giving a full view of its full 19 m length. The water and its light flickering reflections serve as a gap from the shared neighbor wall, and opens another air-façade.
Upstairs, the kids have their own front terrace with a railing made of a combination of cables and steel frames which create a dynamic pattern inspired by the Art-Deco and Bauhaus decorative language scattered all around the white city of Tel Aviv. A modern "Mashrabiya". The cables allow the plants to grow and climb on them and create another element of privacy as well as giving a feel of the outdoors.
This terrace and second floor extend over the ground floor in order to prevent the harsh southern sun overheating the house but, at the same time, also allows the bright light in. Under it - an outdoor shaded seating area next to the pool.
The parents achieved another gardening dream by setting their master bedroom in the lower (basement) floor, alongside the home office/secondary living room. Large windows open onto an adjacent lower garden, which gives an earthy, green retreat, complete with an outside shower.
We always love showcasing the raw materials and structure: the bare concrete ceiling and concrete wall, architectural concrete floor; the constructional steel columns – shaped as a + sign – are also bare and exposed, parallel layer to the glass walls.
The plot is narrow, and shares a wall with a neighbor, but contains everything that was required harmoniously (i.e - to maximize every cm, the pool is made with a PVC lining). Also, while building, we managed to safely maintain the attached old house to the side. The house was built combining conventional methods (on site castings) with a Light-gauge metal framing system method.
