The Beirut Terraces building has terraces, leisure areas and green spaces, features that you will surely want in your future home.
The images of confined people without terraces and without being able to enjoy the outdoor space is not very motivating. However, we have to make an aseptic reading of every situation and look for solutions for the future. To do this, we must avoid old mistakes as much as possible, improving everything we can.
And we are talking about the health sector, as we saw in the last article, the administrative, commercial, and industrial sector, as is being seen with the protocols for action against Covid-19 that companies are applying; or, of course, the residential sector.
It will be the professionals who propose the most appropriate designs for new buildings, as well as the most effective objective reforms of current buildings. Some can be done, others not, at least without altering the historical configuration, the surface or the idiosyncrasy of the construction itself.
In short, right now we have to look at websites, real estate pages, social networks and the entire wide digital range at our fingertips, in search of how we would like our home to be. I have found one that, perhaps, you are interested in knowing.
Beirut Terraces, the residential tower of Lebanon
It is a residential tower located in Lebanon. It’s called Beirut Terraces, and the name already tells you the main reason why I would like to live in one of your apartments in the next quarantine. The property includes countless outdoor recreation areas, which all users can enjoy. It is undoubtedly heaven for confinement.
The tower reaches 121.50 meters in height and the residential summit stands at 114.60 meters. It has 27 floors that house 131 luxury homes, distributed in the 79,200 square meters of built area, about 100,600 when you add the surface of the terraces.
The developer who sponsored the construction is called Benchmark, and to do so he invested a staggering 460 million dollars, about 412 euros. In an effort to achieve maximum attraction and efficiency, it organized an international competition that was won by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, responsible for the design of the property that occupies a privileged location in the Central District of Beirut, called Mina El Hosn. This study devised this asynchronous placement of floors, which allow the appearance of terraces in all directions and of almost all sizes.
Luxury apartments with large terraces and leisure areas
In 2010 the works began and in 2015 they were completed, opening up to 131 new users the possibility of living in the tower. Tenants will enjoy spacious terraces and green areas that are beginning to grow and that, shortly, will form an oasis outside and inside the property. By the way, the company in charge of landscape architecture is called Vladimir Djurovic.
The exterior enclosures are executed with floor-to-ceiling windows, perfect for maximum solar use. In the slabs, a series of openings of different sizes have been planned with a clear aesthetic function that is appreciated at night, when the lights of the building are projected through its openings, creating an unparalleled play of chiaroscuro.
The complex has several types of housing, with 2, 3 and 4 bedrooms, with a very different layout depending on the needs. Thus, the apartments vary in size between 210 and 935 square meters. The penthouses reach 1,050 square meters and have terraces of up to 450 square meters.
Of course, being a luxury property, it has amenities such as a spa with pool, sauna, shopping area, six parking floors and a quite spectacular lobby. The white envelope only deepens the difference between this building and those nearby. It should be noted that part of this whiteness is achieved by means of white marble plates.
A construction designed to reduce the thermal sensation of the terraces
The unique reinforced concrete structure uses solid slab floors and exposed cylindrical pillars, with a central core, which serves as a passage for the facilities, stairwells and elevators. This allows the distribution of the houses in the four orientations.
It should be noted that each elevator leads to a maximum of two houses, making each room of the tower have a lobby. Of course, everything has a trick, and if we look properly, every five floors the pattern of the slabs is repeated, allowing a dimensional rhythm.
The contribution of the large overhangs is not only aesthetic or functional, by allowing the appearance of different types of terraces, but also helps to allow shadows on the large windows, reducing the thermal sensation on days of excessive heat.
Its thickness also allows an addition to balance the temperature using its thermal mass. In other words, it stores heat during the day and expels it at night, preventing, to a certain extent, the cold from taking over the place.
An interior design with differentiated areas
The different apartments have in common the interior designer Vincent Van Duysen, who configured the rooms around three areas: the reception, the rest and leisure spaces and the work area. The lobby opens to a beautiful living room with an obvious terrace and a dining room. Next are the bedrooms that include their own bathrooms, dressing rooms and an entertainment room.
The work areas are the kitchen, storage room, laundry, etc. To pass a quarantine, the ideal is that each room has an independent bathroom, thus extreme personal hygiene, a leisure room, which could serve as a teleworking area, and a lot of open space, the more the better.
It is fair to acknowledge the work of other participants in the execution of the building, such as the Khatib & Alami architecture studio, the engineers of the international Arup, those in charge of the façade, the PP Engeneering company, or the main contractor, without the which nothing is possible, Man Enterprise.
This tower of flats, obviously, was not designed to pass a quarantine, but it has all the requirements for it. We can learn from designs like this to, in the future, give more quality to our residences, which never hurts.