23DegreesN

The residential villa at Muscat aims, in short, to establish a new relationship between the landscape and the city; a place of return to a time where buildings were homely, haptic and locked into the landscape. A building that creates a refuge to balance the hyper-connected technological activity of the 21st century.

The floor of the building unfolds two hugs for those who visit and those who live, creating a building articulated around two meaningful landscaped courtyards. These volumes alternate interior spaces of two types: those that are crossed by the landscape and those that are sheltered inside the haptic stone volumes, framing visual fragments of the outside. The entire construction is a humbling return to the essential. The volumes are low and the finishes are raw: the timber beam ceilings, the rustic plastering of the interior walls and the polished concrete floors connecting with the logic of the landscape and memory of the traditional.