Content area
Full text
A Haifa couple's International-style dream home challenges an Israeli architect. HOMES
Gad Sheaffer, an electrical engineer from Haifa, knew exactly what he wanted his dream house to look like.
"One of my favorite houses is a Mies Van Der Rohe house built in the United States in the late Forties, Farnsworth House in Chicago," says Gad who shares the home with his wife Tamar and two teenage sons. "It's typical of the International style, very boxy and simple, and seems to hover above a meadow."
The only problem with that particular pipe dream was that the plot of land the Sheaffers bought in the plush Haifa suburb of Denya turned out to be triangular.
"It just worked out that way because of the parcellation of land on the Carmel," explains architect Shuki Aboud whose design contrived, nevertheless, to include many of the elements so admired by Gad.
While not exactly hovering above a meadow, the house is built on the slopes of the mountain, surrounded by a seemingly wild garden which is separated from the public land around it by a line of stones rather than a wall, making it look twice as big as it really is.
Huge windows line the side of the house and the...