Women’s Stories – with Ma/Deux studio
We recently had a photoshoot in the home of Racheli, a designer we have known for many years. Every time, our choice of where to photograph is based on the encounter between the space and its aesthetics and its owners. We look for spaces that have layers of life, a home where you can feel the person who lives in it.
Racheli's home was built through a thorough work process by her studio and her partner Orit and brings to light an eclecticism and aesthetics that you don't encounter every day. Getting to know Racheli's home sparked our curiosity about the way she and Orit work and design. Indeed, the interview with them reveals an unexpected combination of skills and strengths that together create spaces that you can't help but feel at home in.
Pho. Moodauthors
Can you introduce yourself?
We are Orit and Racheli.
Racheli Graf Rachim, mother of three daughters, lives between Tel Aviv and Paris at heart.
And Orit Singer, a mother of two sons, lives between Tel Aviv and the open spaces of nature.
We run a Tel Aviv studio for architecture and interior design, but in practice we deal with the life stories of people and families, what motivates them, what excites them, how they make decisions, and what allows them a quality of life in their living spaces.
Pho. Dor Kedmi
Tell us about your work? What field do you come from?
Our studio was born from an unconventional connection.
Racheli started in psychology, out of curiosity about the human soul, and found herself combining it with an old love: advertising. There she specialized in advertising strategy and learned how ideas influence people, how to create a narrative, and how creativity meets needs. She later pursued an MBA in Paris, and that sparked her love affair with the most beautiful city in the world. At that point, aesthetics and design became an inseparable part of her life.
Orit started out in plastic arts and continued to specialize in architecture. She has always been drawn to understanding space from a human perspective, not just as a physical space, but as a system of relationships between people, material, and light. Due to her love of interpersonal connection and the dialogue she creates with clients, a precise and intelligent program is built, leading to a clear architectural interpretation, one that allows the space to express who they are, and who she is as a creator.
The connection between Racheli and Orit created a multidisciplinary partnership in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The intuitive circular thinking of one perfectly integrated with the logical and linear thinking of the other. The synergistic combination made us both better and gave rise to thought processes and innovation that took us to challenging and fascinating places.
Today, the studio is primarily engaged in the planning and design of urban spaces, combining contemporary and innovative design and planning with a great appreciation for history and aesthetic tradition and a deep understanding of color to create timeless spaces that are free from fleeting trends.
Pho. Roni Cnaani
What is your inspiration?
Paris.
The architecture, the fashion, the language, the museums, the living art on the street.
Tel Aviv.
The streets, the people, the markets, the unapologetic energy.
Bustling cities.
We are drawn to the encounter between classic elegance and something a little unexpected.
Between aesthetic discipline and a cheeky moment.
We are fascinated by preserved buildings from different periods and diverse architectural paradigms. We insist on making surprising but informed combinations of colors, eclectic items that combine European with Middle Eastern.
What is the influence of the period on your inspiration and work?
In this period of introspection, we seek precision.
We connect even more with Kant's concept, who defined beauty as an experience of inner harmony, a moment when something feels "right" even before we know how to explain why.
We feel that it is our privilege to bring our customers to expression precisely by bringing ourselves to expression as well.
Pho. Roni Cnaani
Pho. Dor Kedmi
How do craft and handcraft meet all of this?
Maybe this is not a classic question for us, but it is. Craft for us is not a style, but a way of telling the story. Finding the right collaboration between architecture and craft and making a new creation excites us. We are full of appreciation for material, color, detail and the understanding that it is the small details that create culture.
Tell us a story about a dream that came true for you. How did you make it happen?
A Tel Aviv Bauhaus apartment we planned for a foreign resident.
A project that combined historical depth, planning complexity, and collaborating with an international designer. A process from which we learned a lot and allowed us to bring design ideas beyond their boundaries. This work led to a publication in Architectural Digest. It was a moment when we realized that our work not only tells a human story but also allows for an architectural and design discourse.
Pho. Moodauthors
Pho. Moodauthors
Recommendation for life \ Exhibition \ Album \ Motto
Every album by Keren Ann - an artist who has been the soundtrack of our lives for many years. Exhibitions that challenge perception such as a retrospective on Marina Abramovic and the exciting spaces of the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen.
A visit to Japan - to physically feel precision, attention to detail and minimalism.
What are you working on these days?
As always, there are several exciting projects on the table for families waiting for their new home, spaces that need to accommodate complex and beautiful lives.
At the same time, we are expanding our research around interdisciplinary connections. We are developing collaborations and hoping to curate our thinking into a product that summarizes our design philosophy, a meeting between strategy, story and planning.
And what do you wish for the coming year?
To expand our natural field in spaces that excite us immediately when we see them, and also to test our design philosophy, that set of architectural-design values that have crystallized into a language, in unexpected spaces.
Pho. Roni Cnaani
Something you learned from your grandmother. Concrete.
To put on “rose-colored glasses”. To see beauty even when not everything is perfect. To appreciate beautiful tools, precise detail and what the wider world has to offer.
For one of us, it was meticulous French culture, for the other - a love of material and craft. In the end, it is a lesson in aesthetics.
And also, how to make gnocchi.
Pho. Roni Cnaani
Pho. Roni Cnaani
