The project brief was to design a residential unit of approximately 300 square meters for the parents of a family, four units of 150 square meters for the children, and the maximum additional area permitted by the building permit on a 510-square-meter plot, intended for sale.
The proper separation of dual-unit floors and the elimination of shared elevator lobbies without compromising single-unit floors was identified as the main design challenge. Accordingly, the familiar pattern of residential apartments from the 1350s and 1360s (1970s-1980s) of Tehran's vernacular modernism — known in Mashhad as the "khorjini" (saddlebag) plan — was adopted as the project's structure. To reduce the level differences on single-unit floors, adjusting floor heights led to the creation of a duplex unit in the middle of the building with eighty square meters of surplus saleable space, which compensated for the area lost to the central void in the courtyard facade and the increased non-saleable area in elevator lobbies. Subsequently, by introducing other characteristics of late-modern apartment typology — such as semi-open spaces on the floors, positive and negative spaces on the building facades, and the separation of private and public areas in certain floor plans — efforts were made to reinvent this pattern based on new needs.