Keeping busy

After living all their lives in rain-sodden, gray Manchester, England, the couple who own this penthouse decided it was time to bring sunshine into their lives. In their early 70s, they bought the apartment on the 16th floor of the building, situated in a part of Netanya which provides incredible views of the sea to their left, the forest in front and the fields of moshavim to their right. “On some days the sunlight flooding in is so strong, when it's reflected on the white leather furniture, that I have to put on sunglasses,” says the wife. They bought the apartment while still in the planning stage, and did much of the work themselves. Back in Manchester, they each ran a business; he was into wholesale fabrics and thus always had an interest in color and texture; she had a well-known perfumery in town and exercised her artistic urges in window- dressing. Doing the apartment was a joint effort, in which neither partner ever felt the work was demeaning and nothing was too much trouble. For example, when they thought the grouting between the tiles was starting to discolor, the husband got down on his knees and spent two weeks painting the grouting throughout the entire apartment with a tiny paintbrush and white oil-based paint. The original plan for a six-room apartment was adjusted and reduced to four bedrooms. The space for the fifth bedroom was used instead for the kitchen, which together with the lounge and dining room create one huge space. The balcony is equally large, running the entire length of the building. It is enclosed with glass panels, which the couple keeps clean by washing down themselves – on both sides. In the kitchen, lilac panels on the back wall were added to break up the expanse of white tiles. The kitchen cupboards are what the wife calls a “complicated color.” “When we took delivery of the kitchen from a well-known company, all the doors were a slightly different color,” she says. With Mancunian forthrightness, she insisted this was not acceptable, and in the end the company agreed to replace all the painted wood doors. “The surface of the doors was a blue horizontal weave with a shade of gray, all melded together,” she says. “It ended up basically as a pale green.” All appliances are discreetly hidden inside cabinets, while the hydraulic barstools have backs which make for comfortable seating. Immediately next to the kitchen is the dining area, with a table that can extend to 2.5 meters when necessary. “We can seat up to 14 at a push,” say the owners. The color scheme of the lounge picks up the lilac of the kitchen, with two pale lilac sofas facing each other, while the two-seater white couch provides contrast and is very deep and comfortable. A large wooden coffee table in white with a grooved top is in the center, and the cushions of white and lilac add a finishing touch. The owner was pleased to tell me she found them in Home Center. On the table, the striking stainless-steel circular object is actually an avant-garde fruit bowl. The terrace is 100 square meters in size, and also has an entire sitting and dining area out there. One of the outer walls kept cracking and had to be restored every year, until the man of the house decided he had had enough, and instead faced the entire wall with marble slabs. He then built a garden running the entire length of the terrace, faced that with the same marble and lit the whole scene up from beneath with green lights. He is forever looking for more jobs to do around the house, and found one very satisfying project in painting the plain, heavy metal doors of the safe room and the front door. He didn't like the cream shade of these doors, so he painted them gray to match the other doors in the apartment, carefully adding horizontal silver stripes to make them exactly like the other doors. The husband also undertakes more ambitious building projects, like adding a mezzanine floor to a particularly high-ceilinged room. His small touches are everywhere – mosaic borders set into the tiled floors, flowery wallpaper in the guest bathroom and even a colorful mural on the landing outside the apartment to make visitors feel welcome. Retiring to Israel is always a good thing to do, and in the case of this couple, they'll never be bored – as long as there's a beautiful home and garden to maintain.

Keeping busy

After living all their lives in rain-sodden, gray Manchester, England, the couple who own this penthouse decided it was time to bring sunshine into their lives.

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