Journal.

There is a definition of this craft, and the greatest have put it better than anyone.

Tadao Ando: « You cannot simply put something new into a place. You have to absorb what you see around you, what exists on the land ». Zaha Hadid: « Architecture is really about well-being. People want to feel good in a space ». And Jacques Herzog, summing up an entire practice: « We always try to make our projects unique, in the sense that they are made specifically for a given place, a given time, a given budget ».

Listen to the land. Design for the well-being of those who will live there. Never repeat. That is the craft, and it is against this standard that we measure every project.

Designing this way always begins with listening. The client's story first: how they live, what they need, what they have not yet found the words for. Then the land: its light, its slope, its trees, its constraint. From this listening a vision is born, and a project that has never existed and will never exist twice.

My role in this work is not that of an artist. It is closer to that of a conductor: organising needs around a vision, tuning them to a place, and coordinating the technical teams who will give the idea its body. Imagination is not there to show itself off; it is there to push the concept further, to design differently when the easy path would be to repeat.

This is the distinction we hold on to. There is construction: useful, necessary, everywhere. And there is architecture: the kind that listens, that searches, that signs an intention. The two do not carry the same name, and they do not leave the same trace.

Our work is to deserve the second.

Matter gives a project its soul. The rest, the volumes, the plans, organises; but it is matter that makes you feel.

There is old stone, already lived-in, that we gather and set into a contemporary project. It was seen, touched, worn before us; by placing it in the new, we are not just placing a material, we are placing a story, and that story becomes the depth of the place. A project earns its soul at this price: accepting that matter speaks of a time that is not our own.

Then comes execution. I design the way a material will be diverted, cut, patinated, folded, taken out of its use to serve another, and I entrust that gesture to the artisan, whose craft gives the idea its body. Reinventing a material is not applying what you already know: it is seeing the potential buried in a surface and deciding to bring it up. An ordinary material can then become a work, born of an intention, carried by a hand.

But matter is never chosen alone. In front of a marble, I already see the timber that will answer its veining, the tapware that will extend its tone. There are always colours, textures, lights to tune, a marriage to anticipate. Exploring materials is, for me, an endless pleasure: searching, rediscovering, patiently building a material library where each sample waits for the project that will reveal it.

Because the point is not to find the beautiful material. It is to assemble it rightly, in a precise project, with everything that surrounds it. As Herzog & de Meuron put it, we look for materials « as intelligent and complex as natural phenomena, materials that appeal to all our senses ». Rightness is not in the object. It is in the accord.

The client wanted a playful villa, something that stands out, that looks like nothing familiar. That was the starting point, and it was a real GO: the freedom to design differently.

The land, in Ubud, was dense and alive, covered with palms and endemic species. The first decision was the simplest, and the most binding: cut nothing down. Keep the trees, and let the house be born around them. From that constraint came the form, a circular volume that crushes nothing and lets the vegetation wrap it. The tree returns to the centre; the architecture bends to what existed before it.

The rest was built from there. A sculptural slide spirals down from the upper floor into the water, the client's playful idea become an architectural gesture. A net is stretched across the void between the two levels, a reading corner suspended above the living room. A fan-shaped ulin roof crowns the circle like a canopy, and gives the house its name.

None of this is decorative. Every gesture answers the original intention: to make this house an experience rather than an object. That is the meaning of the project, and its answer to a Bali where villas end up looking alike: an architecture you identify at a glance, and remember.

A house the jungle drew first.