A Home that Honors the Past While Moving into the Tuture
A home that honors the past while moving into the future reimagines a once-dark split-level house in Israel for a young family by Halel Architecture and Interior Design. The renovation shifts circulation, light, and daily life, turning the former warren of rooms into a fluid sequence of shared and private zones. Designed in 2025, this house now treats the original structure as an asset rather than a constraint.
Morning light now reaches deep into the former split-level house, catching on brick, steel, and warm wood as it spreads across the unified living level. A once-heavy structure reads as open and continuous, with views pulled toward the surrounding mountains and movement flowing easily between everyday rooms.
This house in Israel, redesigned by Halel Architecture and Interior Design for a young family, reworks an aging split-level into a bright, contemporary home. The project keeps the original structural rhythm but rethinks circulation, bringing the kitchen, dining area, and living room together as the main family volume. Interior choices favor warmth, tactility, and clear zones for each family member, so daily life feels both connected and calm.
Opening The Heart Level
The former compartmentalized core is now one continuous family floor. The kitchen, dining area, and living room stand in easy dialogue, with long sightlines reinforcing their shared role as the home’s heart. Light enters from multiple directions, falling across surfaces rather than stopping at walls, and reveals gentle shifts in level that still mark the house’s split origins. Furniture placement keeps movement clear, leaving generous room for children to cross between zones without breaking the visual field.
Stairs As Light Structure
Where bulky staircases once blocked views, a single airy stair rises on slender steel elements and tension cables. Its thin structure lets light and sightlines pass through, so the transition between levels feels more like a pause than a barrier. The stair becomes a quiet sculptural presence, tying levels together while keeping the emphasis on the surrounding rooms. Moving up or down, family members stay visually connected to the central living level and to each other.
Warm Materials, Gentle Tones
Atmosphere carries as much weight as function here. Brick-clad walls bring grain and shadow, giving the living room depth and a gentle sense of enclosure around the central fireplace. Natural wood flooring runs throughout, softening the contemporary lines and linking different areas with a continuous, tactile surface underfoot. Color stays restrained in shared zones, allowing texture and light to set the mood while more personal tones emerge in the private rooms.
Private Worlds For Each Member
Each family member receives a clearly drawn territory. The two daughters have pastel-toned bedroom suites, with their own bathrooms that feel intimate yet connected to the broader house through material continuity. The parents’ quarters read as a compact boutique suite, bringing together a walk-in closet and a serene bathroom with both a freestanding bathtub and a walk-in shower. Between children’s rooms, a glass-enclosed home office adds a transparent layer, bringing depth to the corridor while allowing work and family life to stay visually linked.
Between House And Garden
Multiple exits lead from the main level down to surrounding gardens. Doors open easily, letting air move through and folding outdoor greenery into daily rituals like meals, study, and quiet evenings by the fireplace. Though the renovation stripped the building back to its structural core and rebuilt roofs and openings, it retains the cadence of the original split-level house. What once felt heavy now reads as a refined, light-filled home that holds memory close while supporting the family’s present rhythm.
Light and shadow track across brick and wood from morning to night. The house stands as a calm frame for ordinary days, tuned to both its structure and the people who live within it.
Photography by Harel Moyal
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