A House the City
No Longer Makes

Hotel Montefiore is the corner

Karl Netter is a short street, one end at Montefiore and the other at Ahad Ha'am. It carries the name of the Alliance envoy who left France to found Mikveh Israel in 1870, and it keeps an intact block of the 1920s around it: the Otshkovsky House at number 2, eclectic, 1925, by Dov Tchudnovsky, with bay windows and Corinthian capitals. The Meir House at Montefiore 40, 1928. Yavne 7 and 9. A shaded, cobbled street that gives no hint of how close the city stands.

Aerial distances

Hotel Montefiore25 m

The Norman170 m

Ahad Ha'am Street210 m

Rothschild Boulevard245 m

Carmel Market550 m

Neve Tzedek920 m

Habima Square930 m

What cannot be made again

Roughly half the buildings in the city's central districts are designated for preservation, and the only direction left for the area is density and height. A plot of some 550 square meters that remains one private house, with four parking spaces and complete privacy, is a planning and economic anomaly. Houses can be restored. Another one cannot be made.

Volume that new construction does not offer

Ceilings rise here to a height you feel from the doorway. Twin plaster ceiling roses over a single axis of chandeliers, a wall of French doors under transom glass, dark parquet laid like stone. The kitchen is a room of its own: cream cabinetry framed in full brass, a long island, a hood built to order. Craftsmanship measured against Europe, not against the local market.

A room without a ceiling

Past the French doors, one more room: a climbing green wall, an outdoor fireplace, seating in the shade of mature planting. The city is a few dozen meters away, and cannot be heard.

An enfilade of three rooms

The principal suite runs as a sequence: sleeping, dressing, bathing. The bathing room, a freestanding tub on a chequered marble floor, opens to a terrace above the rooftops of first Tel Aviv.

The essentials