Each villa is constructed from pre-fabricated materials enabling the project's execution to be time-efficient and of a conscious ecological footprint. It is a minimal yet bold combination of wooden decks and pavers, limestone walls, dry stone façades, and glass openings. This interplay of materials works in unison with the landscaping towards the expression of a coastal context.
The landscaping of our design embraces the principle of varying planar elements. The arrangement of the flora is focused on the boundaries as a means of both aesthetic and physical mass balance. It subtly segregates villas while maintaining communicative fluidity, providing natural visual and auditory privacy to each villa's inhabitants. The thoughtful choice of local plants such as cyprus trees, black locust trees, rhododendron bushes and daisy flower beds hones an eloquent interface between human and nature.
A crucial element contributing to the planar and biophilic characteristic of our design lies in the green roof. It decreases stormwater runoff rate, hence, improving the drainage system. It cools the roof surface by more than 30% while reducing the heat flux to the building. It acts as an air purifier and regulates the indoor temperature, reducing energy consumption.
Additionally, the pre-established requirement to avoid interference directly with the land was the usage of piles. Our choice of material of this fundamental structural element is glued laminated (glulam) timber in an effort to minimize the use of concrete. Made from species like douglas-fir, spruce-pine-fir and western hemlock, glulam possesses excessive load-bearing capabilities along with moisture-resistant and fire-resistant qualities after treatment with high-resistance, industrial adhesives like Melamine and Polyurethene resin. Furthermore, its high dimensional stability ranging till a length of 50m serves ideal for constructing on the steep landscape of the Starigrad. The project positions these piles at uniform distances, especially under the load-bearing walls of the villa structure. Each individual, sustainable, eco-friendly pile will be embedded into the bedrock using a minimal precast concrete plinth and a subsequent 300mm high steel shoe.