Accessible Apartment in Park Tsameret

I had worked on accessible apartments before, mostly for older clients. But when this client got in touch, told me he wanted to plan an apartment and that he uses a wheelchair, I wanted to hear more straight away — a great deal more. He is a capable man whose life took a different course after a road accident, on a long trip with friends in Australia. The enquiry promised a challenge and an education: planning for a body whose dimensions are different, and for a whole life built around it.

The apartment sits high in a residential tower in Park Tsameret, Tel Aviv, looking out over the city — the sea on one side, the rush of the Ayalon on the other. Apartments like this raise a planning problem, because much of the external wall is glass from floor to ceiling. The plan leans on storage and display along the internal walls, while keeping the lines of movement and of sight long and unobstructed.

Did you know that the practical height a person in a wheelchair can reach is about 120 cm? Which means that, beyond the windows, the plan had to distribute a good deal of usable storage below that line, knowing that anything above it is not much use. Even so, the plan also allows for guests and for shared use in the future.

If I thought the plan would rest on the clearances and heights set out in the accessibility handbooks, I was corrected fairly quickly. The client has an unusually narrow wheelchair, and he had studied how he actually lives: he noted the problems, measured the turning radius of his own chair, and tested the reach to every use we proposed. In practice the apartment was fitted to his measurements, in both senses.

In the kitchen and the bathroom the counters allow the chair to come underneath, which led to a basin made specifically for the situation. The "table" this created could be placed against the window, because it is thin enough not to block the view out. The client entertains constantly and asked for a drinks bar; that too is folded into a central storage unit facing the living room, the kitchen and the rear corridor, where the washing machine and dryer sit in the same cupboard. One room is given over to work and to hobbies, music above all.

The bedroom suite is generous, and the bathroom deep inside the apartment still gets daylight because most of its walls are fluted glass — it brings light in, keeps the room private, and does not seal the space off. The vanity is wall-hung, and above it a low mirrored cabinet sits at a height that works from a seated position. In this apartment I did something I have not repeated since: tile made for cladding wet rooms was used on a bedroom wall too, for the texture of it.

The client used to compete in adventure sports and loves the outdoors, so the material language is drawn from nature — even the television wall is a geometric reading of a climbing wall. The dining table in the kitchen is at a height made for him and works as both table and island; a storage unit on castors beneath it rolls away to seat extra guests when the family entertains. As part of the work the safe room was reconfigured, so that the bedroom can be reached privately without crossing the public rooms.