What a colonnade actually is

Most people reading about this district meet the word colonnade as a marketing noun and move on. It is worth stopping on, because it is the single design decision that will decide what walking down a street here feels like, and because it is not a word that means what a lot of readers assume.

A colonnade is not an awning, a canopy, a pergola, a marquee or a shading structure bolted to a facade. It is the building itself. The block above steps forward over the pavement, and the weight of that overhang is carried on a row of columns standing at the outer edge of the walkway. The result is a corridor of covered public space that is structurally part of a private building.

It is one of the oldest urban devices there is, and it survives because it solves an unglamorous problem extremely well: it makes a shopping street usable in weather that would otherwise empty it.

• The Eshkol complex carries about 45,000 sqm of commerce and offices, on lots 301 to 306 and in the colonnades of residential lots 101 to 111.Shavnu masterplan page, 2026-08
• District-wide the plan budgets about 125,000 sqm of commerce, much of it at ground level rather than in a single centre.Shavnu masterplan page, 2026-08
• A colonnade unit sits in the commerce use class, which permits retail, food and drink, and personal services. Employment ground is a different class.Shavnu Journal: what the plan reserves, 2026-08
• Eshkol's colonnades become usable at first occupancy, expected around 2029. Central's promenade retail follows around 2031 and North's high street around 2032.Shavnu district timeline, 2026-08
• Sixteen thousand homes sit above and behind this ground floor, which is what the commerce is there to serve.Plan TA/4444 validation sheet, via Shavnu, 2020-03

Four dimensions decide whether a colonnade is any good, and all four are set in the design plan for a lot long before a tenant sees a unit.

The first is the depth of the walkway, measured from the column line to the shopfront glass. Too shallow and it is a token overhang that shades nothing and holds no tables. Too deep and the back of it never sees daylight and reads as a tunnel.

The second is the height of the soffit, which is the underside of the building above. A low soffit makes a covered walkway feel like a car park. A high one lets light in from the side and makes the space read as a room rather than a gap.

The third is the spacing and thickness of the columns. Columns are the whole trick: they define the outer edge, they carry the load, and they interrupt the view of the shopfronts from the street. Widely spaced slim columns give a shopfront a clear frontage; closely spaced heavy ones give it a series of framed slots.

The fourth is continuity. A colonnade that runs the full length of a block and continues onto the next one is a covered street. A colonnade that stops at every lot boundary is a series of covered porches with rain between them, and the difference is the difference between a shopping street and a row of shops.

In summer the colonnade is a shade device, and on this coast it is a shade device pointed at a specific problem. West-facing glass here takes low, hot, direct afternoon sun. An overhang deep enough to keep that sun off the shopfront changes the temperature at the glass line, changes what the air conditioning has to do behind it, and changes whether a person will stand still on the pavement outside for thirty seconds to look in a window.

In winter it is a rain device, and that is arguably the more valuable half. The rain here is concentrated into a short season and it arrives hard. A continuous covered frontage means a street that stays walkable and shoppable in the weeks when an open pavement is not, which for a small operator is the difference between a slow January and a dead one.

What a colonnade does not do is block wind, and on this coast that is a feature. The sea breeze that builds through a summer afternoon moves straight through a walkway that is open along its outer edge. Shade plus moving air is comfortable in high humidity; shade plus still air is not.

The shopfront moves back from the kerb by the depth of the walkway, and everything about the way a business presents itself changes with it.

Signage stops being a thing you read from across the road and becomes a thing you read from under the cover. The soffit above is a surface that can carry light and lettering, which is why colonnaded streets tend to develop projecting or under-hung signs rather than large facade boards. A shop relying on a big illuminated sign visible from a car has the wrong strategy for this ground floor.

Spill-out space arrives for free, and comes with rules. A café under a colonnade has a covered, shaded, sheltered area in front of its glass that is usable most of the year, which is a genuine asset. What it does not automatically have is the right to fill it. Where the walkway is public passage, occupying it with tables is a permission question, not a fit-out question, and it is one of the first things worth establishing about a specific unit.

Glazing behaves differently too. A set-back, permanently shaded shopfront can hold more glass than an exposed one without becoming an oven, which is why colonnaded retail tends to look more open and less shuttered than the same retail on an exposed facade.

This is the part that gets skipped and it is the part that generates the most friction in real life. In Sde Dov the colonnades are under residential lots. The soffit over the walkway is the underside of a building with people living in it, starting one floor up.

That shapes three things immediately. Hours: a ground-floor use that runs late sits directly beneath bedrooms, and that is a licensing conversation rather than a preference. Noise: a hard soffit over a hard pavement is a reflective surface, so voices and chairs under a colonnade carry further and upward more than they would on an open street. Extraction: a kitchen at ground level in a residential block has to get its exhaust somewhere that is not a neighbour's window, and the route for that is designed into the building rather than added later.

None of this is an argument against the arrangement. Ground-floor commerce under homes is how most good city streets in the world work. It is an argument for knowing, before signing anything, exactly which of those three things the building has already solved and which are left to the tenant.

The alternative was available and was not taken. A district of this size could have consolidated its commerce into one or two large enclosed centres, and plenty of new districts do exactly that.

Putting the commerce along the street instead has a set of predictable consequences. The retail is dispersed, so it serves the immediate few hundred metres rather than pulling the whole district to one place. The frontage is long and the units are small, which suits independents and specialists more than it suits large-format tenants. The street stays populated in the evening because the shops are on the way home rather than at a destination. And the ground floor becomes the public face of the residential blocks rather than a service level behind them.

The cost of that choice is fragility. Dispersed small-unit retail depends on enough people walking past enough of the time. A colonnade with a full population above it is a street; the same colonnade in a partly occupied complex is a covered walkway with the lights off. That is a real risk in the first years here, and it is one that gets discussed less than it should be.