Photography: Tami Shacham, Gido Boaz, Boaz Lavi, Yonatan Blum
It all began with a simple request. “We want to expand our kitchen a bit,” they said. The story ended in a full renovation, right down to the structure of the house as we got down to the smallest details affecting the daily lives of the residents.
A spacious home in Kochav Yair allowed us to investigate a different kind of compactness: Even in a large home, there’s still great importance in understanding the activities taking place within and to plan accordingly, through the use of strategically planned furniture and through the organization of spaces.
Cabinetry+
Before the renovation the bathroom/closet wall contained separate function such as shelves, two doors and a niche for the television. After the renovation, the wall became a cabinet, containing several functions as one collage.
The Robotrick
Outdoor “ceremonies”: To make the fire, to hang laundry, a place to put things down before opening the front door, growing spices and more. All these combined together into a smart piece of furniture that allows storage, relaxation, cooking and cleaning.
The Clothes Line
We can all agree that hanging laundry isn’t always photogenic. When’s the last time you saw a picture of a clothes line featured in a luxurious magazine? Even so, we are in a warm country with a climate perfect for drying laundry outside. If we don’t want to use a dryer, and instead make use of the sun and fresh air, we need to design the "ritual" and not leave it for the clients to buy a ready made item from the hardware store.
The entrance to the home, through to the kitchen
The ceremony of entering the home – putting keys down, hanging up a coat, going through the mail…
All these are accommodated by this custom-designed unit, which further on turns into the electric panel box and in the end becomes part of the kitchen space.
The ceremony of cooking and eating: re-thinking kitchens.
The kitchen serves as an integral part of the life in this home, for hosting family and for meeting over a cup of coffee with friends. All these happen in the “kitchen”, so we put a lot of thought into studying the kitchen experience, in order to come up with a design that comfortably includes the wide variety of activities that take place here.
The kitchen was designed to provide accessibility to the barbecue area (for instance, to take food from the fridge out to the grill) accessibility to the yard (outdoor entertaining) and accessibility to the official eating area of the home.
A new angle on bathrooms…
Who doesn’t love reading in the bathroom?! If you happen to be one of these people, you certainly have a newspaper stand or a straw basket conveniently placed next to the toilet. We decided to design in what everyone puts in afterward anyway… a place to hold reading material, a reserve supply of toilet paper and even a hidden cubby for personal supplies.
A peek into the home gym
The lady of the house is an outstanding sport teacher and holds various classes in her home. For this, we created a Belgian façade incorporating a number of materials: clear glass, frosted glass and a cork board for pinning up updates about her classes.
The ceiling of the workout room is very low. In order to create a feeling of space, we added huge mirrors on both sides of the room, we widened the windows to the maximum possible and lighting was installed along the edges of the ceiling, rather than using traditionally hung fixtures.
Remember we said that the lady of the house is a gym instructor? Well, she’s really a multi-talented woman. She also knows how to sculpt in paper mache and teaches, using her own unique method, so we created a workshop in which she can both work and teach, as well as display her designs that are for sale.