Kekarav A hilltop, three sides held by hills, the fourth held by sky.

From the design team

Why we built it this way.

Kekarav didn’t start with a master plan. It started with a question: what if the people who would live here helped decide what here should be?

So we ran an open design competition. Architects from across the country submitted villa designs, each drawn for one specific plot — its slope, its aspect, the trees already standing on it. We didn’t flatten the hill to fit the homes. We fit the homes to the hill.

One winning entry takes a plot that falls three metres from the road and steps the house down with it: living, dining, kitchen and deck flowing into each other, a plunge pool at the edge, exposed brick and neutral interiors left to do the work. Another lifts the guest bedroom 1.2 metres so parking tucks in beneath it, and runs a courtyard up the spine of the staircase to pull light and air into the middle of the plan.

What held across all of them: wooden louvres for the afternoon sun, passive ventilation before mechanical cooling, low-carbon materials, and a footprint kept deliberately small. Residents then chose the design they wanted to live in.

The Kekarav design team