A limited space is no barrier to making the most of an apartment in an original Bauhaus building in Tel Aviv that mixes color and collectibles to great effect.
By GLORIA DEUTSCHinside home 88 224(photo credit: Eyal Izhar)
When you rent an apartment in a building that's been standing for 75 years, you just might get stuck with the original Art Deco floor tiles. That's what happened to the renter of this ground-floor, two-room apartment when she began to live here 15 years ago, and she still has ambivalent feelings about her floor.
On the one hand it's rather thrilling to think that you are walking on the original floor, the one chosen by the 1930s designer and put down when the Bauhaus International style was at the height of its glory in Tel Aviv. Like many of its neighbors, the building is practically a historic site, constructed on one of those leafy quiet streets a step away from the wide avenues of Ibn Gvirol and Arlosoroff.
On the other, it meant building her color scheme and interior decor around the striking biscuit-colored geometric tile which it's hard not to notice when you walk into the small 60-square-meter apartment.
Somehow she has managed to create a completely charming home, making the most of the small space without any feeling of clutter or crowding. She's even found room to display two attractive collections, one of old cookie and coffee tins from her native Holland and another of KLM airlines ceramic houses which are given out to business travelers.
"It's not that I ever traveled in business class, but I used to work in the tourist business for years, which is how I acquired them," she explains.
She furnished the small sitting room slowly over several years, acquiring a couch from Ikea, then an easy chair in beige, then another in red.
"It wasn't so much for economy reasons, more because I'm very particular and waited until I could get exactly what I wanted," she says. "I must have looked at a thousand tables until I found the simple square wooden one I liked and which was the right size."
Because nothing matches and every color was dictated by the floor, she found that putting scatter cushions in the different shades brought it all together. And looking on the bright side of living in such an old building, the ceilings are exceptionally high and she has taken advantage of this to hang a crystal chandelier over the whole scene.
The decor of the lounge is completed with six Perspex tables which can be moved around to create any pattern or combination, and a David Gerstein work of cyclists adds a bright splash of color to one of the walls.
She is also blessed with green fingers and cultivates several healthy plants around the apartment, as well as taking care of the long-established garden outside with its pomegranate trees and array of cacti. The garden is really an extension of her balcony and although the building is a three-story one, it seems to be for her own exclusive use.
Two tall glass-fronted cupboards stand at the entrance to the bedroom and contain family photos, silver and souvenirs of her life before aliya The bedroom also doubles as a computer room and workroom, and is bright and airy, with two windows onto the garden as the apartment is a corner one.
She opens the built-in closet and proudly shows me the perfect order in which all her clothes are kept, with dresses, sweaters and pants all color-coded and perfectly folded.
It is no surprise to discover that professionally she now works for a company that goes into people's homes and tidies up their mess. "Tidiness is in the genes," she maintains.
The tiny triangular bathroom is full of touches of bright color, and she proudly tells me she even managed to fit a washing machine and a dryer into it.
Finally we inspect the kitchen, the only thing she changed from the original 1933 fixtures and fittings. "I put in the cheapest I could find," she says.
Besides the two collections mentioned earlier, she has several pieces of Delft-like blue-and-white china to remind her of Holland - although after 30 years here and 15 in this apartment, nostalgia isn't a big issue. It's too much fun living in the green heart of Tel Aviv.
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