MAD Architecture & Design Wraps a Lebanese Villa Around Ancient Oaks Overlooking the Mediterranean

There is a familiar playbook for building a villa on a Mediterranean hillside: clear the site, pour a white box, frame the view, add an infinity pool. Baconi Villa follows almost none of it. Designed by MAD Architecture & Design and completed in 2024, this 700 square meter residence in Lebanon treats the existing landscape not as a backdrop but as a co-author. Ancient oak trees puncture the plan. Stone retaining walls grow directly from the terrain. The concrete slab that defines the roof was shaped in response to the tree canopy it sits beneath. The result is a house that feels less placed on its site than excavated from it.

What makes Baconi Villa genuinely interesting, rather than merely picturesque, is the structural commitment required to preserve those oaks. Designing around existing trees is not a gesture; it is an engineering constraint that ripples through every decision, from column placement to drainage. The villa accepts these constraints willingly, and the architecture is better for it. Rooms gain unexpected interior courtyards. The entry sequence weaves beneath a timber carport where a trunk rises through an opening in the beams. Spaces that would otherwise be generic living areas become specific, rooted, unrepeatable.

A Site That Writes the Plan

Seen from the air, the logic of Baconi Villa becomes immediately legible. The building is not a single volume but a series of linear masses threaded along the hillside's contours, with the pool terrace carved into the slope at the uppermost level. Dense vegetation crowds the edges on every side, and the timber deck and rectangular pool read as a precise clearing in an otherwise unbroken canopy. The drone perspectives reveal how little of the site was actually disturbed; the building footprint is compact relative to the land it occupies.

The steep topography allowed MAD Architecture & Design to stack program vertically across multiple basement levels, burying much of the house into the earth. What reads from above as a single-story pavilion is, in section, a three-level residence that uses the slope to hide its mass. It is a strategy that keeps the roofline low and prevents the villa from dominating the trees around it.

Stone, Timber, and the Weight of the Ground

The material palette is deliberately limited: stone masonry, timber, concrete, and glass. The stone walls do double duty, acting as both structural retaining elements and finished surfaces. At night, the masonry reads as a continuous geological feature, the exterior stair tucked beneath the recessed timber ceiling almost invisible against the rock face. During the day, the upper level reveals a brick facade softened by a deep timber soffit that extends well beyond the glazing line, providing passive shade.

Timber dominates the horizontal planes: soffits, roof slabs, the pool deck. It keeps the upper volume visually lightweight against the heavy stone base. The contrast is deliberate and effective. The lower portions of the house anchor to the earth, rough and gravitational; the upper portions hover, warm and sheltering. A concrete chimney mass punctuates this horizontal language, rising vertically through the canopy as the one element that asserts itself above the tree line.

Trees That Pierce the Architecture

The entry courtyard is the villa's most telling moment. Timber carport beams frame a mature tree growing directly through the structure, its trunk surrounded by stone masonry as though the wall was built around it. Because it was. This is not a planter dropped into a void; it is a structural accommodation that required the architects to coordinate beam spacing, waterproofing, and future growth allowances around a living element whose dimensions are not fixed.

Inside, a glazed skylight frames another tree in an interior courtyard, flooding the stone-clad space with filtered light. The timber ceiling meets the masonry walls cleanly, but the real focal point is the trunk at the center of the room. These moments give Baconi Villa its identity. They are specific to this site, this cluster of oaks, this particular slope. No other villa could replicate them, and that irreproducibility is exactly the point.

The Pool as Horizon Line

The infinity pool occupies the villa's most prominent terrace, positioned so its edge appears to dissolve into the wooded hillside below. At dusk, the illuminated timber deck and still water create a sharp contrast against the deep blue sky, and the cantilevered roof overhead compresses the view into a horizontal band of landscape. It is cinematic, yes, but it also serves a spatial purpose: the pool deck functions as an outdoor living room, connected to the interior through floor-to-ceiling glass that slides open to erase the threshold entirely.

The planting beds integrated into the terrace edge soften what could have been a stark geometric platform. Instead, vegetation creeps back into the architecture even at this, its most overtly luxurious moment. The night view, with the glass-walled entry glowing among olive trees, underscores how the house remains porous to its surroundings regardless of the hour.

Cantilevered Volumes and the Forest Canopy

From below, the cantilevered timber roof and concrete chimney mass read as an angular presence among the native trees, almost geological in its weight. The angled soffit catches light differently throughout the day, and the deep overhang creates a zone of permanent shade along the glazed facade. It is a passive cooling strategy disguised as a formal gesture: by pushing the roof plane well beyond the glass line, the architects reduced direct solar gain on the interior while maintaining unobstructed views outward.

The chimney, rising as a raw concrete monolith through the vegetation, gives the composition a vertical anchor. Without it, the long horizontal lines of timber and glass might read as too diffuse. With it, the villa has a center of gravity, a hearth element that signals inhabitation from a distance.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan confirms what the aerial photographs suggest: the building footprint is a long, curving bar that follows the land's contours, with the pool positioned at the upper edge and tree canopy notations scattered across the drawing. The ground floor plan shows the entry sequence moving laterally along the slope, distributing the main living areas in a linear arrangement that maximizes the contact between interior spaces and the surrounding landscape.

The two basement level plans reveal the full extent of the buried program. Linear circulation spines connect rooms organized along the slope, with the interior courtyard appearing as a void punched through the lower levels to bring daylight and vegetation deep into the section. The room divisions are straightforward, almost restrained, letting the spatial drama come from the section rather than the plan. It is a strategy well suited to steep terrain: keep the plan simple, let the topography generate complexity.

Why This Project Matters

Baconi Villa matters because it demonstrates what it actually costs, in design effort and structural compromise, to preserve mature trees on a building site. Many projects claim to "respond to the landscape." Few are willing to let a tree trunk dictate the spacing of their structural beams. MAD Architecture & Design accepted that constraint and turned it into the villa's defining quality. Every courtyard, every skylight cut, every offset column tells the story of a design team that chose specificity over convenience.

In a Mediterranean residential market saturated with white-box villas that treat views as trophies, this project offers a counter-argument. The view is still there, the pool is still there, but the house refuses to dominate. It buries itself, wraps around trunks, and lets the forest hold its ground. That restraint, backed by genuine structural ingenuity, is what elevates Baconi Villa from a luxury residence to a piece of architecture worth studying.

Baconi Villa by MAD Architecture & Design. Location: Lebanon. Area: 700 m². Year: 2024. Photography by Ralph & Eliane Azar.

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