R/I house

The Savyon residential area was built to guarantee a pleasant isolated life outside the city limits. It is a luxury “gated community” consisting of villas surrounded by parks and gardens and is no more than 18 minutes from Tel Aviv and the Ben Gurion airport. So, although appreciated for its natural surroundings, it has easy access to the country’s various infrastructures and road links.

The house we designed is based on the letter lamed (ל) and consists of two vertical marks pointing in opposite directions and connected together by a horizontal line. The house is thus constructed from two long narrow parallelepipeds with different orientations connected by a two-storied volume relating the two parts of the site. It stands in a secret and hidden corner of the neighborhood, protected by a roof of impenetrable greenery. The house is hidden from the road both because of its position and, above all, because of the diagonal movement of the path. From the road you can only see a blank façade, the main entrance, and a vertical slash that reveals a part of the house’s internal patio. The higher central volume, placed at the heart of the site, is distant from the road and has a full view of the garden. And so, privacy is maintained by taking into consideration the use of the volumes and the way of life of those who live in them.

Two main criteria lie behind the subdivision of the space: the generation and age of those living there, and its nature and vegetation. These are the underlying inspiration for the children’s quarters, the parent’s floor, the domestic areas connected to the greenery and the swimming pool, the apartments for guests and personnel, and the cinema built at a lower level and overlooking an internal courtyard.

Our aim was to make the house appear absent from the site so that it can be seen only through views that are more elusive than revealing, and be glimpsed rather than observed.
This wish to reduce the volumetric mass and offer the place its fullest expression is evident inside the house. In fact, once having crossed the threshold, our attention is held by the patio which acts as a corner between the children’s quarters lower down and the two-storied central block. This is edged by a narrow passageway which both increases luminosity and mitigates the stratification of the horizontal and vertical circuits in this area, the center of attraction for the house. If the patio is observed or crossed from various directions it acts as an element pointing forward from the living room to the entrance. Although not located in a central position it is a nucleus that highlights the space and, at the same time, makes details and stratified planes visible through very long views. In this way necessary and unexpected moments of perceptual incorrectness are created, reminiscent of the deformed and unreal perspective systems of medieval art.

The three ground floor volumes accommodate various lifestyles. The functionally and temporally independent children’s night zone, the living room, the domestic spaces, and the entrance, are all visually linked even though quite distant from each other. Social life and private life are all an integral part of the spatial organization of the house. The second-floor attic in the central block is the private apartment of the parents, the place where they can enjoy the deep green vegetation of the neighborhood, the branches of the patio trees and two stone gardens.