Project: GA Penthouse
Architects: Pitsou Kedem Architects
Design Team: Shirley Marco, Pitsou Kedem
Location: Tel-Aviv, Israel
Total floor area: 375 sqm
Design and execution: 2016-2021
Photography: Amit Geron
Text by Pitsou Kedem
A penthouse apartment in Tel Aviv with a built-up area of 375 sqm, terraces extending over 130 sqm and a 150 sqm roof.
The top three floors in a boutique building in Tel Aviv’s urban space are combined into a light-filled apartment in which sunbeams, water reflections and shadows create intrigue and connect the various floors.
The GA penthouse revolves around an inner core whose walls are encased in a vertical grid of white rectangles of varying shapes and thicknesses that serves as the anchor around which the public spaces flow, while vertical movement between floors is via two white metal staircases.
To one side, a large aperture in the floor creates a double-height space reached by one of the pair of white metal staircases, this one with closed tread and adjoining but not touching the gleaming grid leads to a comfortable TV corner. A narrow white steel bridge, with glass railings, traverses the space enabling uninterrupted flow around the uppermost level of the apartment.
The second staircase – this one with open tread – descends from an aperture in the rooftop and leads down into the apartment bringing light and shadow play into the family snug alongside it.
Alongside the kitchen and the main living room, when the great expanses of floor to ceiling sliding windows are fully opened, indoors and outdoors blend into one and circular and continuous horizontal flow is achieved.
The GA penthouse ceiling, which is made of exposed concrete, is perforated with round skylights of varying sizes, some offering a view of the sky and others a view of the rooftop swimming pool. The flow of the water in the pool creates an ever-changing drama of reflections that flit and flicker across the living room floor.
The transparent pool, which extends the full-length of the extensive rooftop, is encased in see-through acrylic casting to which the stone floor of the roof itself merges seamlessly, giving the illusion that the pool is a continuum of the roof’s surface area. The openings in the pool’s stone base allow a view from within the pool all the way down to the penthouse’s lowest floor, enabling visual contact between the swimmer and anyone in the spaces below.
