Cookie Cutter Retreat

Three semicircular buildings are set into a sloping site: a private home, a shared dwelling and a hall for gatherings and events. Sized S, M and L by their programmes, they share one geometry but meet the terrain in different ways.

Each curved wall works as a retaining wall, while the straight side opens as a broad glazed facade to the landscape. A diagonal wall cuts through every semicircle, dividing public from private. Behind it sit compact, intricate interiors, described by the architects as fragments borrowed almost verbatim from houses by Frank Gehry, Toyo Ito and Álvaro Siza. The dense rooms meet the open span of the semicircle, setting enclosure against a wide view.

The curved outer walls are white-painted concrete, the diagonal cuts a deep blue close to black. Exposed concrete ceilings carry a dense grid of lamps. Full-height glazing faces the landscape under a tilted canopy of metal mesh, and round concrete columns mark the threshold, among them a thick blue column with white stripes that repeats in the glass.

The same graphic logic runs through doors, kitchens and furniture, with small touches of fluorescent yellow. The larger hall takes a range of activities, while the smaller buildings hold more intimate living spaces.

Granite stones found on the site become places to sit, gather or wander. The ground was dug out so the buildings settle into the slope, and from a distance they recede into the hillside, leaving broad windows and bright blue chimneys as the clearest signs of life.