Interior renovation project of a two-story house by Studio ETN located in Tel Aviv, Israel for a family of four.
We got a three-dimensional rectangle that covers a large area. The challenge was to preserve the sense of open space and synergy between outside and inside while creating warmth and intimacy.
The main concept at the center of the design was to emphasize the core of the house which includes the guest toilet, laundry room, water systems, electricity, communication and air conditioning and the stairs that take us to the floor of the rooms. Felt very right to give a very vertical expression present to such a horizontal living space.
We called the core the generator, and immediately it dictated the colors, rhythm, geometry, light and shadow, felt very right to turn the service spaces that are usually gray, technical and discreet into the core of the house concept. Which is at their center, we put the user | Operator | The tenant, who operates his house as a kind of conceptually mechanical operation.
The core helped us divide the spacious public floor into two stern ones: the living space on one side and the kitchen space on the other.
We thickened the core head all around to hide air conditioning ducts that are essential to the floor, thus preventing unwanted ceiling lowering in the center of the house, leaving the ceiling very high. The three sides of the core are all functional and each one acts as a subtraction from the mass of the core and makes it lighter: in the side facing the living space we have created a storage element that becomes a railing.
In the long side of the core, we created a dedicated niche for the dining area that received a special cladding plus carpentry to conceal the entrance to the laundry and guest toilet area, which includes storage cabinets for everyday useful elements like a vacuum cleaner, coat closet, keyholders and phone charging. When the third side becomes a fully equipped and functional kitchen.
