A house for a family that lives apart and meets here. Four adult siblings, four homes in four cities, one shared address on the Red Sea. The parents live in a separate residence nearby. The house must hold them all when they arrive together, and stand quietly when no one comes for months.
The plot is 7,895 square metres and meets the sea along its full eastern edge. There is no road between the building and the beach, no wall, no boundary that requires a gate. The shoreline is the garden. The architecture's first task is to negotiate that fact without drama.
The programme is large for a private house: eight independent suites, indoor and outdoor dining, a social core for up to thirty, a pool, a cinema, service quarters. On a conventional site this would feel institutional. Here it must remain domestic. The organisation of these parts is the design.
It is a seasonal house. It will be empty for long stretches and full for short ones. It must be beautiful when crowded and dignified when alone.
The threshold between house and sea is the most important space.
The plot meets the sea along its full eastern edge. There is no road, no wall, no buffer between building and beach. The shoreline becomes the garden.
The Egyptian vernacular gives a complete, climate-tested language to draw from: mass walls, deep eaves, the courtyard as thermal engine. These are not stylistic choices — they are answers to the same questions we are asking.
The desert climate, with year-round high solar radiation and a dry coastal wind, demands shade as a primary architectural concern. Mechanical cooling is available but cannot be the answer.
The size of the programme — eight suites, indoor and outdoor dining, a social core for thirty — risks losing the domestic scale that makes a house feel like home. Eight bedrooms can read as a hotel.
The seasonality of the house: long stretches of emptiness, short bursts of full occupation. The architecture must hold both states with dignity, and not feel like a stage that has lost its actors.
The shoreline as a soft edge with no clear boundary between plot and public beach. The building must protect privacy without erecting a wall.
The plot meets the sea along its full eastern edge. There is no road, no wall, no buffer. The shoreline becomes the garden. Few sites in the Red Sea offer this directness.
The brief asks for a single shared address for a family that lives in four cities. The house can mean something specific: the place where the family becomes one, even briefly.
The Egyptian vernacular tradition gives a complete, climate-tested architectural language to draw from without imitation. Mass, courtyard, depth, eaves — these are not stylistic choices.
The orientation favours us: prevailing wind from the north, sea to the east. A linear, east-facing organisation is naturally aligned with both wind and view.
The palette is short. Egyptian limestone for exterior walls, terraces and the pool surround — honed or bush-hammered, warm enough to absorb the desert light without reflecting glare. Iroko for pergolas, screens and ceiling soffits, ageing untreated to silver grey under the marine air. Tadelakt inside the wet rooms and selected living spaces, polished to a soft sheen. Board-formed concrete where mass and permanence are needed.
Earth, stone, wood, shade. Nothing else.
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Plot of 7,895 square metres on the Red Sea coast at El Gouna. The eastern edge of the plot meets the sea along its full length, with no road, wall or buffer between the building and the beach. The shoreline forms the garden of the house.
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Eight independent suites. A social core sized for thirty people for formal and informal gatherings. Indoor and outdoor dining. A 22 × 7 m pool with adjacent deck. A private cinema room. Service quarters for four staff with separate access.
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Approximately 1,500 sqm of covered, conditioned interior space across two storeys. A further 800 sqm of covered exterior space — terraces, loggias and pergolas — extends the conditioned floorplate without adding to its mechanical load.
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Ground floor: arrival, social core, dining, kitchen, service quarters, two ground-level suites. First floor: six suites including two master suites facing the sea. Accessible roof with pergolas, water management plant and solar panels concealed behind the parapets.
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Main pool 22 × 7 m, oriented east–west. Pool deck of 420 sqm, in honed limestone matching the facade. Sand frontage of 65 m runs the full eastern boundary. Direct beach access without intermediate steps. Internal patios in the suite wings hold quieter, planted microclimates.
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Two master suites at first floor, both facing the sea, each with private terrace and bathroom. Six standard suites distributed across both floors, each with its own bathroom and either a private terrace, garden or courtyard. All suites quiet, away from the social core.
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Four covered guest spaces and two service spaces. Vehicular access from the west, separate from the pedestrian arrival sequence. Service circulation does not cross the social or private zones.
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Climate-responsive design as the primary instrument. Limestone mass walls provide thermal lag. Deep eaves and pergolas cast shade on facades during peak hours. Cross ventilation between sea and courtyard sides reduces mechanical cooling load. Air conditioning available but not the primary instrument.
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Concept design completed Q2 2026. Schematic design and design development through Q4 2026. Construction documents and tender Q1 — Q2 2027. Construction Q3 2027 — Q4 2029. First family season summer 2030.
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Designed by Balzar Arquitectos, Valencia. Principal architect: Txema García Ballester. Local consultants engaged for structural, MEP and landscape during schematic phase.
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Hassan Fathy — New Gourna, Egypt
Fathy's project for New Gourna remains a foundational study of how vernacular Egyptian construction — mud-brick mass, courtyard organisation, deep eaves — produces shade through geometry rather than through devices.
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Geoffrey Bawa — Lunuganga, Sri Lanka
Bawa's lifelong house and garden at Lunuganga shows how the boundary between architecture and landscape can be dissolved into a continuous, walkable gradient.
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Hiroshi Sugimoto — Seascapes
Sugimoto reduces the horizon to its irreducible geometry — a single line dividing two tones. The first opening from the main living room frames the sea on those terms.
