Richard Meier’s only building in Israel. Rothschild’s most serious residential address.
Rothschild Boulevard · Completed 2015 · Design: Richard Meier & Partners
There are a small number of residential buildings in the world that a serious architecture collector would recognise on sight, from a single detail of the facade, without any other information. The Seagram Building in New York. 432 Park Avenue. A handful of John Pawson’s private commissions. Meier on Rothschild sits in that category — the only building of its kind in Israel, and arguably the only one the country is likely to have for some time.
Richard Meier, who passed at ninety, was the twenty-ninth Pritzker laureate. His body of work — the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Ara Pacis in Rome, the white apartment towers on Perry Street — is defined by a single set of principles applied with unusual discipline over six decades. White. Orthogonal. Filled with light. The Rothschild tower is among the last buildings completed under his direct authorship, and it brings the full Meier vocabulary to a boulevard that had not previously hosted international architecture at this level.
On the boulevard
Rothschild is Tel Aviv’s single most recognisable residential address, and Meier is its most deliberate new building.
The boulevard itself does not need much explanation. UNESCO-protected Bauhaus on both sides, the financial district at its northern end, Neve Tzedek at its southern, a canopy of trees that has been maturing for a century. To place a Meier tower in the middle of this — white, precise, thirty-six storeys taller than anything the neighbourhood was designed to accommodate — was a decision that divided opinion when the building was under construction and continues to divide it now.
It is also, quietly, a decision the market has ratified. Per-square-metre prices at the tower are the highest on the boulevard by a meaningful margin, and have been since completion.
On the buyer
Meier attracts a buyer who has usually owned architecture before.
The building’s resident register contains a disproportionate number of owners whose previous primary residences were in Manhattan, London, or Paris — buyers who understand what a Pritzker laureate is, what the provenance of an apartment means, and why the premium for this building exists. A significant minority of the original purchasers bought off-plan and have not sold since.
The typical Meier buyer is not the typical Rothschild buyer. Rothschild attracts founders, senior partners, and the families of each. Meier attracts a narrower slice — the ones among them for whom the architect’s name on the door is itself part of the reason for the purchase.
On representation
Meier transactions are deliberate events in the boulevard’s calendar.
The building does not produce volume turnover. Residences come up perhaps three or four times in a typical year, sometimes fewer, and almost always through agencies with a long-standing relationship with the management company and the original developer. The proportion of units held by the founding purchasers remains, a decade after completion, quite high.
We have handled introductions at Meier — both acquisitions and, on one occasion, the private disposal of a residence that was never publicly listed. The building repays patience. It also, in our experience, repays the introduction coming from the right source.
The only Pritzker laureate on the boulevard. The only white tower on Rothschild. And the benchmark against which every new residential building in central Tel Aviv will be compared for some time.
A note from the office. If you are considering a residence at Meier on Rothschild — as a buyer, as an owner, or simply as a matter under quiet consideration — a brief conversation is the simplest place to begin.
→ Request a conversation
By appointment. By introduction. By conversation.
