We’ve spent a lot of time lately looking at layered interiors and highly designed hotels, and started to miss the feeling of simply noticing the building itself. So this week, we’re recovering from a bit of palate fatigue and sharing a few projects that caught our eye for architectural reasons. A return to structure, and material, and form, you know?
We sent one of our readers to Casa TO for their trip to Puerto Escondido last weekend. It’s a Ludwig Godefroy-designed hotel conceived as a contemporary Oaxacan temple, with references ranging from the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul to Hornsey Wood Reservoir in London. It’s a wonderfully geometric, brutalist stay where you can never quite tell whether you’re inside or outside. (Hint: it’s both.)
If you’re planning a trip to Puerto Escondido (or elsewhere), hit our line — we’ll send you our recs.
There’s something that feels quite ceremonial about moving through ruins — feeling more connected to both your body and the space around you, rather than disappearing into yourself.
For Alchemy Saunas, Rezen transformed the former stables and cellar at the base of the Royal George Hotel to channel the feeling of a Roman bathhouse, where bathing was as much a communal and architectural experience as a private one.
It’s part of a larger story around the long-disused heritage hotel, which is gradually being brought back into use as a third space for the community after years of redevelopment plans.
In Central Victoria, Pepper & Well renovated Lumeah (originally known as Harley House). It’s one of the more intact surviving works of Australian modernist architect Paul Couch, whose architecture was unusually rigorous in its treatment of structure and material.
Couch pushed Australian modernism toward an almost extreme material clarity, believing not only that buildings should respond to climate, landscape, material and construction, but that structure wasn’t something to conceal and decorate afterward — it should create the space, character and visual order of the building itself.
For the renovation, Pepper & Well preserved the house’s underlying logic, removed later interventions that obscured it, and introduced only what was necessary to make the house more accessible and functional for its owners as they age.
In Tokyo, Tatsuhiko Endo turned a forty-year-old sewing-machine shop into a gallery for collected objects, where handmade Japanese ceramics sit alongside industrial modernist furniture, contemporary lighting, plants and hi-fi equipment.
That commingling is part of Rurbanism’s broader philosophy: rural meets urban, old meets new, and the handmade meets the machined. Exploring one object alongside another, each with different histories and origins, Endo thinks, reveals things about both that might otherwise go unnoticed.
And for Gaoxingli Insun Cinema in Haikou, One Plus Partnership looked to Hainan’s relationship with the South China Sea and the shoreline that shapes the city’s coastal identity. The bricks were made from sand from nearby beaches, then stacked under the concept Footprints Fade, Waves Embrace. Even movement through the space feels fluid, guided by smaller waves that run along the floor and are traced by concealed lighting. You almost forget you’re swimming through stone.