Set into the garden of an existing residence in Ahmedabad, The Dip Pavilion was designed by andblack design studio as a poolside retreat built mainly for evening use. The brief asked for a lounge, a gym, outdoor seating and a swimming pool to sit together as one composition, while keeping a measured distance from the main house rather than competing with it.

The roof is the pavilion’s defining move, and it reads less like a plane that folds down at one point than a single continuous surface that dips at its centre and lifts again at both ends, curving down almost to the ground before rising back up into two broad, flat overhangs. Seen head on, the effect is closer to a wide, shallow V stretched horizontally across the building than a conventional roofline. Cast in pale concrete on the outside, the underside is lined entirely in narrow strips of dark timber, laid to follow the roof’s curve so the wood itself seems to bend with the structure rather than sit flat beneath it. Slender round columns, set back from the glass line, carry the roof at even intervals, keeping the walls beneath it almost entirely transparent.

That glazed volume runs the full length of the pavilion, floor to ceiling, with narrow black-framed panels dividing the glass into a steady rhythm. Inside, the lounge holds a mix of low-slung dark leather seating and pale bouclé pieces, arranged near a full-height mirrored panel and a run of pendant lights with round, softly lit glass shades. A totem of stacked, rough-textured spheres in blue, ochre, red, green and stone tones stands near the glass, running floor to ceiling beside a sculptural wooden armchair and a black-and-white stone side table, all visible straight through the facade from outside.

At the rear, the pool runs alongside the pavilion in dark green tile, with a stepped timber deck set into the water, cut through with small square openings that let jets rise directly out of the pool’s surface. A tall screen in rust-toned vertical timber battens stands at one end, partly enclosing a stone-clad wall where a sheet of water runs down in a continuous curtain into the pool below, audible presumably from the deck itself.

Two washrooms extend the same material language. One is finished almost entirely in grey-veined marble, floor and walls together, with a mirrored, fluted cylindrical basin unit and a sculptural black wall-mounted rack for towels, bent into an irregular geometric line rather than a straight bar. A second washroom is lined in a soft, curved plaster wall with rounded recessed grooves, its ceiling fitted with a dense grid of small, individually lit dome-shaped fixtures, paired with a similar mirrored cylindrical basin set against a run of full-height mirror panels.

At dusk, the glazed volume glows from within against the darkening garden, the pool lit in deep teal beneath it, the roof’s pale underside catching the last of the light before the timber lining disappears into shadow above.

Fact File

Photography: Ishita Sitwala

Typology: Residential Poolside Pavilion (Residential)

Architecture Studio: andblack design studio

Architect/Designer: Jwalant Mahadevwala

Collaborator: Studio In-Dtale

Engineering: Shehzad Irani, Schafbock design+workshop

Landscape Architect: A. Y. Retiwalla

Client: Sukoon and Shanna Shah

Location: Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

Project Year: 2025

Program: Lounge, gym, floating deck, waterfall, swimming pool

The 3,000 sq ft villa sits in Varca, on Goa’s southern coast, built for a family of four and shaped by a brief that leaned toward Balinese sensibility while staying grounded in its Goan setting. Studio Tilt handled the interiors and landscape, working alongside architects Natasha Kumar and Abhijit Sawant on a house where light, water and vegetation carry the design rather than sit as decoration on top of it.

The plan runs north to south, a decision that keeps daylight diffused and even through the day and lets cross-ventilation work with the region’s tropical climate. Large openings and high ceilings support that same goal, and this framework becomes the mechanism through which the house lets nature in, not as a finishing touch but as something built into how the plan works.

Water announces itself early. The pool sits directly behind the foyer, visible on arrival, setting up the relationship between the built house and what surrounds it. A water body then runs into the centre of the plan, easing the transition between common areas and private ones. Rising through this same zone, in the double-height living and dining space, a frangipani tree grows under a skylight positioned to let daylight move across the interior over the course of the day, the tree and the light working as a single spatial idea rather than two separate features.

Living, dining and kitchen occupy the ground floor as one continuous, open space, holding visual contact with the outdoors throughout. The living area sits close enough to the pool for a tactile relationship with the water, while the open kitchen and its breakfast table are positioned for daily, shared use. Toward the rear, the pool extends further and meets a jacuzzi, and together they form a threshold, both physical and visual, between the communal spaces and the master suite.

The upper floor holds the more private programme: a family lounge, a guest room, and the children’s bedrooms at either end. The sloped, overhanging eaves and large openings established on the ground floor carry through here, and a window in the daughter’s room looks back down into the living space below, tying the two levels together visually.

Materially, the house works with restraint. Beige stone cladding runs from the interior through to the pool backdrop outside, keeping that transition seamless, with green and blue accents pulled from the surrounding landscape set against the neutral base. Natural materials, the water elements and the shaded volumes of the house combine into an environment built for a specific kind of sensory calm.

The Balinese references built into the brief show up as spatial decisions rather than surface style: water bodies are threaded through the plan, there’s an inset living area, and continuity is kept between indoors and out. Adapted to a Goan tropical climate, these choices also carry the house’s climate-responsiveness and energy efficiency, rather than functioning as reference points on their own. Architecture, interiors and landscape were developed together from the start, and the result treats the boundary between inside and outside as something meant to dissolve, letting the house read as an extension of the ground it sits on.

Fact File

Photography: Manthan Yadav

Project Name: A Slice of Ubud

Typology: Residential Villa

Location: Varca, South Goa, India

Built-up Area: 3,000 sq ft

Principal Designers: Natasha Kumar, Abhijit Sawant

Interior Design & Styling: Studio Tilt

Landscape Design: Studio Tilt

The plot sits on a dense Delhi street, hemmed in by neighbouring apartment buildings on either side. The brief for Casa Paradiso asked for grandeur within that constraint, an 11,000 sq ft residence that could feel expansive despite its narrow, linear footprint. Ansh Goel, founder of Studio Reset, found the answer in a section rather than a plan. Verticality carries the experience here, with space expanding through volume, light and visual porosity across levels rather than through width.

Raised above a stilt level, the house rises through three floors organised around a triple-height atrium. That volume does more than anchor the layout. It pulls natural light down through the plan, letting it reach spaces well removed from the front facade. Rooms opening onto this core share in the scale, with ceiling heights exceeding 13 feet throughout.

Getting there structurally took its own resolving. “We were dealing with significant height and large spans, so the challenge was to make sure beams and columns didn’t interrupt the volume, allowing the atrium to read as one continuous, open space,” says Ansh. None of this shows on the exterior. The upper storeys are wrapped in dark graphite metal cladding, run in narrow vertical flutes, and cantilever out over a lighter stone-clad base. A circular window, screened by vertical louvres, sits at first-floor level, and a timber-slatted door assembly, flanked by glass panels, is recessed at the entrance beneath the overhang. Vertical planting runs up sections of the facade between the openings. At the top, a curved balcony traces a bowed line across the front of the house, capped by a timber-lined canopy roof cut through with a square skylight opening.

The staircase that Ansh describes as a defining presence in the house is built entirely in marble; its treads run against a glass balustrade with a slim black handrail, set beneath a run of pendant lights hung at staggered heights, a mix of dark bronze disc fixtures and brass ones. Behind it, a wall in fine vertical fluting continues the same rhythm the architect points to elsewhere in the interiors. A large abstract painting, its palette built from red, black, ochre and blue in a fragmented, face-like composition, hangs on the wall facing the stair.

The entertainment lounge on the top floor, the room the brief describes as the journey’s endpoint, is finished in dark tones, with black panelled walls outlined in fine gold trim set beneath a curved cove ceiling detail. A long pendant fixture made of alabaster tubing banded in brass runs the length of the room, hung on leather straps from the ceiling, alongside a black-bladed ceiling fan and a recessed projector aimed at a wall-mounted screen. Curved sectional sofas in beige are arranged on a circular rug patterned in muted grey, mauve and taupe blocks, dressed with fringed cushions in mustard, brown and taupe. A round black leather pouffe serves as the central table, holding a pale sculptural object, alongside a smaller black table and a white cube side table. This room opens onto the terrace, furnished with grey rope-woven sofas and an armchair; brown cushions offset with a scattering in a mustard geometric print; and a rope-topped coffee table holding a stack of magazines. A stone-clad accent wall, laid in an irregular stacked pattern, runs alongside a living green wall planted in layers of green and deep purple foliage, the whole terrace sheltered under the same timber-slatted canopy visible from the street.

Each bedroom is treated as a suite, with its own lounge and wardrobe, and one of these sitting areas, done in a floral wallpaper panel with softer, lighter tones, matches the daughter’s room as described in the brief. A banquette-style daybed with a tufted, upholstered headboard sits against the wallpaper, dressed with floral-print cushions with tasselled trim, a mustard throw and a plush toy left on the cushions. Overhead, a brass chandelier with curved tubular glass arms hangs from a coved ceiling detail that echoes the one in the entertainment lounge below. Two organic, curved marble-top tables on brass fin legs sit on a striped rug in front of the daybed, holding books, a black ceramic vase with white flowers, glass spheres and a small bronze sculpture. A white bedside table with a mushroom-shaped glass lamp sits beside the upholstered headboard of the bed itself.

“A conscious decision was made to limit the number of rooms so that scale and spatial generosity could take precedence over density,” Ansh explains. That restraint is what carries the house. Casa Paradiso builds its sense of luxury from height, openness and the connections it draws across its own levels, rather than from footprint alone.

Fact File

Photography: Deepak Aggarwal

Project Name: Casa Paradiso

Typology: Private Residential Villa

Category: Residential

Location: Delhi, India

Built-up Area: 11,000 sq ft

Architect: Studio Reset

Principal Designer: Ansh Goel

Sabrab Architecture has completed a 500-square-metre residence in Melides, in Portugal’s Alentejo region, working around a stand of mature cork oaks rather than clearing the site to build. The project takes cues from the region’s traditional building forms, reworking them through more contemporary construction rather than copying their appearance directly.

The clients, a family based internationally, asked for a house that could serve two different purposes at once: a quiet retreat for time alone and a space equipped to host guests without feeling stretched between the two functions. Sabrab organised the house as a series of low volumes that step across the site’s existing slope instead of flattening it first, finished externally in lime plaster supplied by Fassa Bortolo. Keeping the building’s profile low and the layout worked into the terrain rather than against it, the design avoids the visual weight a larger single volume would carry on the same plot.

Wide glazed sections run along much of the house’s length, positioning the surrounding pine and cork oak trees as a constant, deliberate part of each interior view rather than something glimpsed occasionally. The connection to older Alentejo building methods, thick perimeter walls, muted earthy colouring, and deep roof overhangs for shade shows up here in updated form, still functioning as climate protection rather than serving as a purely visual reference. Ceilings finished with a rough concrete texture and floors laid in Margres stone both respond to daylight differently depending on the hour, giving interior surfaces a changing quality across a single day.

The interior design carries the same restraint. Custom-built timber cabinetry sits alongside a black stone kitchen island, with fixtures from Gessi throughout, together keeping the spaces understated without tipping into bareness or unfinishedness. Artemide light fixtures add warmth to the dining and living spaces once the sun goes down. Furniture selections, a mix of pieces made by Sabrab and modern classics from Vitra, including Eames and Barcelona chairs, were chosen with long-term use in mind rather than short-term trends. Colour stays deliberately muted across every room, leaving the view of surrounding trees to supply most of the visual variation instead of the furnishings themselves.

Outdoors, a pool is set into a timber deck at one edge of the property, stretching the usable living area beyond the house’s walls and softening the boundary between built structure and forest. Fixed seating runs along the deck’s edge, supplemented by freestanding loungers, giving the exterior areas the same level of planning applied to the rooms inside.

At night, the house takes on a different presence. Each low volume stays lit from within, visible individually against the surrounding dark landscape rather than reading as one continuous illuminated mass. The result is a house whose scale sits comfortably within its site rather than working to be noticed from it.

Fact File:

Project: Casa em Melides

Typology: Residential

Architecture: Sabrab Architecture

Interior Design: Sabrab Interior Design Atelier

Location: Melides, Grândola, Portugal

Year: 2025

Area: 500 sq. m.

Key materials: Natural lime plaster (Fassa Bortolo), Margres stone flooring, concrete-textured ceilings

Lighting: Artemide

Fixtures and sanitaryware: Gessi

Furniture: Sabrab (sofas, kitchen); Vitra (Eames and Barcelona chairs)

Photography: Ivo Tavares Studio

Maison Terra started with a decision that shaped everything after it: no television in the rooms where the family actually gathers. In this four-bedroom villa in Tilal Al Ghaf, D’Ora Tokai Designs kept the main living areas screen-free, leaving space for conversation, reading, and the kind of unplanned interaction a glowing screen tends to interrupt. A separate family room absorbs the television instead, freeing the rest of the home to run on different terms, more open, more present, and without a single fixed point pulling everyone’s attention.

That same instinct carried through the rest of the project. The brief began with two targeted extensions, expanding the living areas and adding a pair of home offices that account for how much work has folded into daily domestic life. Rather than treating these additions as afterthoughts, the design team built them into the home’s existing logic, so the offices read as considered rooms rather than spaces added out of necessity.

The house’s most defining feature actually grew out of a limitation. A structural column near the ground floor couldn’t be removed, so instead of working around it, the designers reworked it into a curved architectural element that now separates the living and dining areas. That curve became something of a recurring signature, echoed afterwards in ceilings, joinery, mirrors, and freestanding furniture throughout the villa. A rounded mirror with a stone frame repeats the same soft geometry near the entry, and the curved column reappears in plaster form elsewhere on the ground floor, its rounded profile catching light differently as the day moves. What started as a structural constraint ended up setting the tone for a house built around precise but never hard-edged geometry.

Material choices follow that same restraint. Plastered walls, light oak flooring, and natural stone form a warm, continuous base across the home, layered with muted blush, terracotta, plum, mustard, and softened yellow tones. In the living room, that palette shows up in bouclé seating and abstract figurative artwork worked in ochre and rust, while the dining room pairs a stone-topped table with a rounded, arched mirror in the same warm marble tones. Nowhere does one colour take over the room; the effect comes from layering rather than any single bold statement.

Bespoke furnishings, developed with DOT Objects, hold the rooms together with a consistency closer to architecture than styling. A round-topped marble side table with a fluted stone base sits in the main living room, its dark veining picking up the same tones used in the entry mirror and dining table elsewhere in the home. The dining table itself, a swirling stone slab set on a similarly veined base, was designed specifically for this project, as was the arched mirror and much of the integrated shelving throughout the ground floor. A behind-the-scenes preparation kitchen keeps the main kitchen visually calm, letting it function as a space for hosting rather than one built purely for cooking.

The ground floor separates into distinct zones without walls doing all the work. One area gathers around conversation and low, curved seating; another sits apart for quieter reading and retreat, tucked behind a run of open wood shelving lined with small ceramic objects and books. This layering of function lets the home shift naturally across a single day, from morning coffee to evening hosting, without anyone needing to physically leave the room they’re already in.

Upstairs, bedrooms carry the same material restraint into a quieter register. In the primary bedroom, a textured plaster panel rises behind the bed, framed on either side by vertical strips of light oak, with a pair of round pendant lights hanging beside it on brass rods. The effect softens what could otherwise read as a stark headboard wall into something closer to a piece of applied craft.

Vastu principles informed the planning throughout, guiding not just aesthetics but the underlying spatial alignment of the home. D’Ora Tokai Designs describes Maison Terra as an extension of its broader approach to restorative residential design, building homes meant to support how people actually live day to day rather than simply how a house is meant to look.

Fact File:

Project: Maison Terra

Typology: Residential

Interior Design: D’Ora Tokai Designs

Location: Tilal Al Ghaf, Dubai, UAE

Bespoke furniture: DOT Objects

Key materials: Plaster, light oak, natural stone, marble

Le Atelier Architectural Bureau has completed Lisichkin Les House in a cottage estate outside Moscow, emphasising terracotta and charcoal as primary design materials rather than secondary accents. The facade folds into two interlocking volumes, one curved and dark and one angular and rust-toned, punctured by a grid of circular openings and a single oversized porthole window that frames the entrance. The result reads as a fairly direct argument, made without much apology, that a house can be sculptural and confident in colour without needing a written concept to justify the choice.

The brief behind the house was practical rather than conceptual. A family with two children needed a floor plan that balanced shared family space with room for retreat while preserving specific sightlines to the surrounding trees and open landscape beyond the property. The ground floor holds the shared parts of daily life: a living room built around a freestanding cylindrical fireplace, an open kitchen and dining area, a light-filled entrance hall, and a sauna suite tucked to one side. Upstairs, the plan splits cleanly into two wings, children’s rooms on one side and a master suite and private study on the other, giving each part of the family its own separated zone without needing a larger footprint to do it.

Inside, the material palette shifts noticeably from the exterior’s boldness into warm off-white plaster, stone, timber, and soft textiles, a quieter register but not a disconnected one. The same confidence that defines the facade still surfaces at specific points throughout the interior. A circular soaking tub sits against terracotta hexagon tile in one bathroom, echoing the curved forms used outside. Elsewhere, a veined marble backsplash reads almost like a landscape rendered in miniature, its natural patterning doing more visual work than a flat material would. Upstairs, a dressing area features bold yellow cabinetry, bringing the facade’s visual confidence into a private space rather than limiting it to the public areas.

Window placement was worked out room by room rather than following one fixed rule across the house. From the living room sofa, the surrounding tree line closes in tightly around the glass, framing a private, enclosed view. From the primary suite upstairs, by contrast, the roofline of a neighbouring cottage sits deliberately within the frame, a view chosen rather than simply left open to whatever happened to be outside. Across the house, the surrounding landscape functions as a material in its own right, considered with the same level of intent as the colour and form used elsewhere in the design.

The house doesn’t lean on an explicit concept to justify its more unusual choices: the circular cutouts, the collision between the curved grey volume and the warmer terracotta one, and the sunburst of yellow tucked into a private dressing room. It holds together as built, legible on its own terms without requiring a written explanation to make the pieces cohere.

Fact File:

Project: Lisichkin Les House

Typology: Residential

Architect: Le Atelier Architectural Bureau

Project Team: Sergey Kolchin, Gleb Kulikovsky, Anastasia Volkova

Location: Lisichkin Les cottage estate, Solnechnogorsk district, Moscow Oblast, Russia

Year: 2025

Area: 222 sq. m.

Photography: Maxim Loskutovst in pairing craft techniques with newer materials and production methods.