Family Apartment in Ramat Gan

Galit and Amir came to me wanting to improve the way they live, after a period of looking for a new apartment in their area and realising it was too expensive. The layout of the bedrooms stayed as it was. The dining table, which blocked the space, was done away with — in its place a generous island that seats enough people for most of what they need, and beside it a console that extends for the large gathering that happens rarely.

The central idea is a connection, in movement and in sight, between the deep end of the kitchen and the living room and the view beyond it. That created a diagonal axis joining the two far poles of the public space, and the form of the kitchen follows it. The dropped ceilings in the living room and the kitchen reinforce the perspective this line of sight creates, which in the end gives the illusion of a large, deep space and puts the emphasis on the apartment's real advantage: the view.

The kitchen was installed on an angle, which allowed worktops of varying depth suited to different needs on each of its two wings. A drinks bar hangs above the island, and on its inner side it conceals the extractor above the hob.

The angle made a narrow face towards the living room possible, and into it we set a timber sculpture laid out vertically to match the division of the shelves. Like the other artworks in the apartment, it is there to show the force of the quiet in a femininity sure of itself. The artworks are original pieces by the photographer Zohar Ron, and the sculpture was found after a great deal of wandering in one of the corners of the Jaffa flea market.

As in most of the homes we plan, the layout here allows easy eye contact between the people in the public space — for convenience, and to strengthen how the family talks to each other.