The daughter of celebrated fashion designer Gideon Oberson, Dana has released a new book House of Oberson: A Design Legacy. One aim of the book, she says, is to champion the design skills of a country better known for its security, and export them internationally.
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Israeli architect Dana ObersonKAMER•A
The book explores not only her architectural work and her creative philosophy around it, but also the design legacy of her family. Her grandparents fled their native Croatia in the Second World War, and both her parents were born in Italy, before they immigrated to Israel. They were childhood friends who married at 18 and started a fashion business making dresses. Gideon was renowned for his bold use of fabrics and structure, and approached fashion as a form of architecture, in turn influencing his daughter’s architectural vision.
“My father was a visionary of fashion design, and I grew up in a house where he was already very famous in Israel,” says Dana. “It was always natural to speak on Friday nights about textiles, fabrics and swatches of colours, advertisements and catalogues.”
Her childhood home was filled with bronze sculptures made by her father, and from a young age she became fascinated by everything to do with design from fashion to graphics, interiors to architecture.
“To me, everything is design,” she says of the philosophy that defines her work. “It's how you enter a house, which piece of art you buy… I want everything to be beautiful and to have a reason why it's there.”
She studied graphic design after her service in the army, but felt it was “too two-dimensional” and craved space with which to work. In switching to architecture, she found her natural place.
In 2002, Dana and her partner Oded Livyatan established OBERSON, a multidisciplinary architecture and design studio specialising in diverse projects including hotels, luxury resorts and high-end homes and public spaces. Her “borderless” office, as she describes it, includes interior designers, architects, industrial designers and so on.
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“I like touching more than one sector of the profession,” she says. “Some projects I do architecture and interiors; some projects I also do the landscaping. I choose textiles, I choose art. I think the tree you plant outside has a connection with the art piece you're choosing for the wall and the textures. I have a very holistic approach to design.”
What she does not like is a modern project. “I can look at a Japanese house and find it very beautiful, but it's not something that I could make, because I love projects that are very layered. There’s the locality, the plot, the house, the interior, the textiles; it all needs to be aligned.”
This is why she chooses organic materials over man-made. While the world is drawn towards materials such as granite, porcelain and plastic, she is “in love with the natural”.
“I love stone, textures and materials in which you feel their age,” she says, grabbing a handful of her own cheek. “I'm not full of Botox, and people know that I'm 50. It’s the same with stone. I like seeing a beautiful used home and not a plastic one that looks the same after 20 years.”
Also important in her work, she says, are skills in listening and psychology, to truly understand the needs of her clients and what works for each individual family. One father of a religious family approached her to transform his home into something that would feel like a resort. The family had a large home to accommodate their six children and grandparents coming to stay from abroad, and avoided the hassle of travel – “Because they have kids with many ages, and it's not easy to travel as 12 people all the time,” says Oberson.
“He told me, ‘I want to come home and feel I live in a resort hotel,’ which was a funny task. I started thinking, ‘what is resort life?’”
She and her team added a pool, a gym, a spa with saunas, a games room for the children and a basketball court, pictures of which can be seen and admired in the centre of her book.
“Nobody needs to go out, because you have everything in,” she says of how today’s premium housing in Israel is often hotel-influenced. Most of the houses she designs today have gyms, saunas and steam rooms. “People want to take the wellness idea home, and a cinema room with very good acoustics – they want everything in their house to feel like a hotel.”
Concrete Palm Villa by Dana Oberson, Oded Livyatan, Sivan Puritz, Hadar Budara, Jenya Gershevitch, Danielle Gazit, Ofra Goldberg[Missing Credit]
As a mother of three – and a dog, too – Oberson considers all the needs of a Jewish family at home. In a world that revolves around technology, her goal is to create better communication in a home through design rather than gadgets. One example is how people cook.
“The idea of the island, that when you cook you look at people – you don't need to cook with your face watching the wall,” she says. “When I design, I look at perspectives. I'm the queen of my house and it's important for me when I'm standing in the kitchen to see who's entering, who's in the living room... The kids see you, you see them, nothing is hidden behind you. These perspectives help to make a better ambiance. It makes a better way of living. A well-designed home makes a better atmosphere for a family.”
And the dining area must, of course, have the space to accommodate a large table for Friday night dinners.
“I buy furniture everywhere, and there's nowhere in the world that people can buy a seven-metre table for a Friday Shabbat dinner. A Jewish home needs to accommodate the people who come, and there's nowhere in the world where tables for Shabbat are as big as in Israel.”
With her son in the army as a reserve for the past two years, Oberson describes living in Israel as “very rough”. But her profession has remained a daily joy for her. “It's not easy living here the past nearly three years, but every day I wake up, I say I'm so lucky. I love what I do, it really is a gift.”
House of Oberson: A Design Legacy is published by Rizzoli
