We were approached by a rising young development company to design a tower in the Trabaud neighborhood in Achrafieh. The program was to be a high end residential development in a very bourgeois address.

The L-shaped geometry of the site played a role in the development of the project’s scheme. On the site’s shorter side, we opted to design a three level town house to provide seamless alignment with the street’s existing fabric, while on the longer side, along the main street, we designed a 24 floor tower.

The design absorbed the street envelop limit by creating a terrace at the tenth floor and yielding a very special penthouse there. The lower levels had two units per floor for a 640sqm floor plate, while the upper volume housed single apartments per floor at 420sqm, crowned by two duplexes and a top of roof terrace.

We chose to increase the sizes of the windows to increase natural light and ventilation into the units where possible; this also helped reduce the solid nature of the external surface. In fact this was in line with the planar reading that we used to structure the growth of the tower, and the different levels and terraces it housed as a result of the breaks. The north south oriented granite clad walls, are braced by wood and metal clad surfaces, permeated by the generous glazed windows.

Several basements support the tower with services, parking and technical spaces.

photo credit: İeva Saudargaitė