The Levent Villa private social club’s architectural design blends the client’s aspirations to have a place to entertain business guests, host their employee’s social activities, and invest in the quality of life in one of Istanbul’s distinctive modern neighborhoods through three concepts: 1) continuity of characters + motifs, 2) contrasting geometries + materials, and 3) interlocking volumes + program. These three design concepts emerged from a process of revealing information of property’s neighbourhood history, the material aesthetics of the organization (advanced vessel fabrication and an ostentatious business culture), and an analysis of a demanding program (a full service restaurant, four boutique hotel rooms and areas for wellness / relaxation).
Continuity of the Characters + Motifs
The exterior design remains humbled to the straightforward proportions of the original building design and is constructed from materials familiar to the past and present neighborhood character. In contrast to the symmetrical stucco façade, the interior design has a dramatic and lush ambiance. To give continuity to the contrasting experience in transitioning from the exterior, to the interior, the project choreograph a series of thematic design elements -- expressed on the entry stone, the guard rails, wood screens, the skylights, the water elements, and the color palette. The thematic elements were constructed from metaphors of sea vessel transportation and included orientation in navigation and sea life (seaweed particularly). The landscape design takes full advantage of the villa’s generous outdoor environment continuing the dining environment to the exterior and creating a variety of water elements on axis of close and distant framed views.

A compass was designed for the project and used in the public to private transition of the project, the entry gate and the oval volume of the hotel room entry. At the site entry the compass is a 2D drawing embossed into the stone. In contrast, the oval volume’s compass is used as 3D object to animate the movement of the daylight moving in the space. The decorative motif of steel works for the elevator, balcony rails and screens were created from seaweed patterns that capture the dynamic movements of the sea. These figure ground forms make reference to the dramatic sunlight rays being cast through the water’s depths.
Contrasting Geometries + Materials
To create a the transition of mind from a public urban environment to an intimate social environment one enters through a decorative gate, along series of elevated stepping stones, to a finely crafted decorative wood entry door. It is when one enters they understand the simple stucco rectangular envelope is penetrated by a lantern oval geometry that extends through the vertical volumes of the interior and concludes with a skylight oriented south-east. The interior’s materials and structures are affluent with a lush glass elevator, a precision crafted oval steel glass bridge connecting the hotel rooms, warm colored marble floors, and vibrant silk upholsteries.

A playfulness in contrast is also articulated in the material and color palettes to achieve a bold harmony. The materials are selected for their lightness, mechanical precision and their symbolic expressions of corporate affluence. Sheet steel is exciting to work with in this project due to its strong reference to transportation vessel structures, but as an elegant means to express its precision of form, simple details and its finesse to widthThroughout the project contrasting red-green hues and dark-light tones are expressed in the stone, glass, wood, upholstery and painted plaster finishes. In the landscape red marble volumes are vibrant in their contrast to the rich greens of the 150 year old sculptural olive tree and the green mosaic pool. The coldness and the heavy materiality of steel and glass are balanced with the integration of hardwood (Oak) at the points of human contact. The handrails, doors, and integrated structural furnishing is shaped from Oak and given different finishes based on the closeness of touch.

The notion of contrast is further explored in the site planning and landscape design. The east-west axis of the villa is composed of the entry, elevator, fire place. The outdoor spaces are organized with the dining are to the north of the axis and relaxing area to the south of the axis. The dining area is a single plane of light grey marble that continues from the mixed seating of the interior dining. The relaxing area is dominated by the pool set amongst vertical black granite walls and acts as a formal visual backdrop to both the interior loca dining/bar and the outdoor dinning.

Interlocking Volumes + Program
The 1950’s Levent Villa’s were designed as single family residence with generous floor areas, but today these envelopes are quite thrifty for a corporate social club. With strict municipal design guidelines, the building envelope was fixed to its original size and the architectural team embraced the sectional potential of the volumes to understand the potential program orientations. The process revealed that limited floor spaces (270 cm clear)could be experientially enlarged through the use of high ceilings, mezzanine levels, wall washing skylights and a lanterns constructed of a glass floors.

The dinning level is immediately connected from the entry level to the first floor hotel room foyer and basement through a glass elevator. To enhance the spatial experience of this connection, the daylight and ambient evening light washes down the oval walls and through the glass oval bridge. The room level take full advantage of the pitch roof of the envelope to create sculpted ceilings and a mezzanine level for the two garden side rooms. Each room has a skylight; in the rooms with mezzanines the skylights give a great opportunity for distant views while in the single level rooms they allow light to wash the shaped walls. The interlocking of the vertical volumes allowed the natural light to penetrate deep into the interior spaces allowing for the social club to have a changing ambience and to be the steward various interior flora, including a collection of bonsais.

The envelope of the guest house is a rectangular with a 115 m2 footprint; the envelope contains the whole of the building’s structural system. The rectangular volume contains three levels and a mezzanine (basement, ground level and room level) with a floor to floor height of three meters. To connect the spatial experience of the open horizontal open to the vertical spaces a light well was placed in the center of the volume and penetrates all levels. A two meter oval skylight was placed parallel to the east roof plane. The light from the oval skylight is captured in an oval volume that expands into a four meter glass oval bridge connecting the all the room entries. The glass oval bridge allows a diffused soft light to penetrate the dining level as well as give a dynamic pause to open plan ceiling surface in the dining. From the basement raises a glass elevator that penetrates through dining level, the glass bridge and gives a dynamic vertical circulation up into the oval skylight.