A 200 square meters residence, with a ground level floor and first floor, for a lovely family.

In our first meetings with the clients, we discussed the importance of integrating the house into its surrounding environment and the clients expressed their desire for a spacious house with a warm and welcoming feeling.

 

 The challenge we faced was integrating a house with countryside characteristics into an urban situation. We wanted to avoid the feeling that the house is alienated from its urban environment. Our goal was to combine the warm countryside elements and the urban situation in a right way.

 

 We started with investigating the location of the house, its surrounding environment, and the right way to fit it in. We were happy to find out that the lot is located between an urban street and a green open field view (Nof Ha Sharon) and decided to “play” with the tension between those two ends.

 

   When looking at the front of the house, one can see we designed the upper floor to have a clean visibility with a symmetrical composition and a smooth white texture while the ground floor is decorated with “red bricks” tiles that fit in the composition and create a feeling the most of the building’s “weight” is in the ground floor, which, in turn, makes the building look shorter than it actually is and as a result, connects them to the earth.

 

 An additional goal we had in planning the house was to create a building that gives the feeling that it stands by its own, an individual building, not a half of a townhouse.

The detachment from the rest of the building is reflected in several manners. First, we looked at the roof and decided that changing the roof’s angles can detach the house from the other half of the building. The roof slant angles relate to the house as if it’s a whole building instead of half a building.

In addition, we separated the house from the joint wall with a balcony, a staircase with a light window above it that separates the house from the joint wall and goes on to the patio that goes all the way to the back yard.