Award for cool youngsters’ areas in hospitals, inns, museums

The Sarit Shani Hay Studio from Tel Aviv won the Dezeen 2021 Awards” Public vote on the best interior design studio.

Hay tells ISRAEL21c that her all-women studio carried out many child-centered projects in 2020 and 2021 despite the challenges of the pandemic.

Dezeen, a globally influential architecture and design website, has featured several of Hays’ projects – including a groundbreaking one including school in Tel Aviv – and reached out to them to apply for Interior Design Studio of the Year award.

Installation by Sarit Shani Hay Studio in the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. Photo by Roni Cnaani

The finalists were reduced to five and the public was invited to vote for their favorite online. Sarit Shani Hay Studio received 29 percent of the vote.

The projects presented included two luxury hotel playrooms – a desert theme in the new Six senses Shaharut and a Jerusalem theme that takes up an entire floor in the David Citadel.

Sarit Shani Hay’s desert playroom in the luxury hotel Six Senses Shaharut. Photo by Roni Cnaani

She also presented photos of child-friendly areas that her studio designed at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, Abarbanel Mental Health Center in Bat Yam and Shamir Medical Center in Be’er Ya’akov.

A therapeutic space designed by Sarit Shani Hay Studio at Sheba Medical Center. Photo by Roni Cnaani

Hays recent exhibitions in the Holon Design Museum with handmade animals and for the Biennale im Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv.

“Soft Landscape” by Sarit Shani Hay Studio in the Design Museum Holon. Photo by Roni Cnaani

In 2020, Hay published a bilingual book, Creative rooms for children.

Hay says that for more than 25 years her studio has specialized in the design of spaces that “have a formative effect on the development, well-being and creative thinking of a child”.