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If you've booked with us, you're staying in a building that's part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. Nobody mentions this at check-in, because in this part of Tel Aviv it's unremarkable - the next building along is much the same, and so is the one after that. That's rather the point of the White City: it isn't a monument you visit, it's a neighbourhood people live in.

The short version

• 16 Ruppin Street is a 1930s International Style building - what everyone here calls Bauhaus.
• Tel Aviv's White City was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003.
• You don't need a tour. The best examples are on the streets between us and Dizengoff.
• Look for four things: a flat roof, white render, deep balconies, and narrow stairwell windows.

Why there's so much of it here

In the 1930s a generation of architects who had trained in Europe - several of them at the Bauhaus school itself - arrived in a city that was expanding fast and had almost nothing built yet. They brought a style stripped of ornament, and they adapted it to a place with far more sun than Dessau or Berlin.

That adaptation is the interesting part. The deep balconies aren't a flourish; they're shade. The buildings sit on columns so air can move underneath. Windows are small on the sun-facing walls and generous where they're sheltered. It's a European idea rewritten for a Mediterranean summer, which is why it looks at home here and slightly odd in photographs of the originals.

What to look for

Once you've seen these four things you'll notice them everywhere, and the walk to the beach becomes a different walk.

Flat roofs. No tiles, no pitch. Often a roof terrace, sometimes with a garden on it - ours has plants you can see from the street if you stand back far enough.

White or pale render. Hence the name. Decades of sun and salt mean the reality is closer to cream, and a restored facade stands out sharply against an unrestored neighbour.

Balconies that stick out. This is the giveaway. They cantilever from the building with no visible support, stacked one above another up a corner. Some are rounded, sweeping around the angle of the building in a curve. Others - including ours - are square, with deep flat slabs casting hard shadows down the facade.

Narrow vertical windows. Look for a thin strip of window climbing the full height of a facade, usually beside the entrance. That's the stairwell, and the strip is often called a thermometer window. It's the one detail that turns a plain wall into something worth photographing.

Our building

16 Ruppin is the square-balcony kind. Three levels of them stack up the corner, each a plain slab with nothing underneath it, throwing a hard band of shadow across the render on a sunny morning. The roofline is flat and unbroken. There's no decoration anywhere on the facade - no mouldings, no cornice, nothing applied. The building is doing the whole job with proportion and shadow.

It's a working building rather than a restored showpiece. There are air-conditioning units bolted to the walls and cables running across the render, exactly as there are on almost every building on this street. Restoration in the White City is slow and expensive, and most of these buildings are simply lived in. If you're expecting a museum piece, this isn't one.

There are 11 apartments in the building altogether, of which we let 7 as holiday apartments. The rest are homes, so you're staying among neighbours rather than in a block given over entirely to visitors.

Inside, the apartments have been renovated - Apartment 6 and Apartment 7 keep the high ceilings the period is good for, and Apartment 7 looks onto the trees along Ruppin Street itself.

A short walk, starting at the door

You don't need to go far. Turn out of the building and walk the streets between here and Dizengoff, and you'll pass dozens of these buildings in twenty minutes. Look up above the shopfronts - the ground floor of a White City building is often a supermarket or a bakery, and the architecture starts at first-floor level.

If you want to go further, Dizengoff Square and the streets running off it hold some of the best-restored examples in the city, and Rothschild Boulevard south of there is the postcard version: wide, tree-lined, and lined with the buildings that get photographed. It's a comfortable walk from us, or a short ride.

Come back along the seafront. It's 200m from our door to the beach, and the light on the way home in the late afternoon is when all this looks its best.