Gallery Apartment on Shenkin Street, Tel Aviv
This apartment originally had no gallery floor — simply a tall space asking to be used. The client, a developer, bought it along with the apartment below it ("the garden apartment on Shenkin") as an investment, and his brief was: "create an experience that will raise the value of the apartment." Which is to say there was no real client I was fitting the apartment to, and to some extent I made an experience I believe in — openness and communication at their fullest, while keeping the ability to be private. The imagined client was a single person or a couple wanting boutique living.
The gallery floor was built on steel ribs kept as thin as possible, so that the balance between the height of the kitchen and the height of the master suite above would be as comfortable as it could be. Timber stairs were built at the entrance in the knowledge that they — or more accurately the volume beneath them — also had to hold storage and serve as the entrance cupboard, which to my mind is required in the proper planning of any apartment.
The kitchen sits near the entrance, a galley kitchen as is usual here: tall cupboards facing an island. In this case the island is against the external wall, and the sink and hob are there too, which creates a sense of connection between whoever is preparing food at the island and whoever is sitting, say, on the sofa watching television.
An open display unit was designed to hold the television as well, so it reads as one of the exhibits. That unit also accompanies the movement towards the round dining area at the end of the space, near the large window, with tall, elegant curtains behind it.
At the entrance we also made a small work corner for a laptop — because we all need one — bounded by a linear mashrabiya, so as not to shrink the sense of space and to keep things flowing. The entrance floor also holds one room that doubles as the safe room.
The upper level holds the master suite: a bedroom with a wardrobe and an open passage to a side wing for the bathroom. The suite is open to the entrance floor and the living area through clear glass partitions that can be closed for acoustic separation. A roller blind dropping from a slot in the ceiling to the floor gives the visual separation for complete privacy. Since the working assumption was a single person or a couple, the assumption was that most of the time it would stay open.
The lavatory in the bathroom sits deep in the room, out of sight from the sleeping area and from the entrance floor. The bathing experience takes in a floor-standing basin, a freestanding bath and a herringbone mosaic floor. Beside the basin is a practical storage unit with a mirror on its other face.
The paintings in the house are by Naomi Fuchs and by Haya Shpes, chosen partly to put Israeli art on the walls.
