Instinto Estudio Frames the Nosara Jungle with Two Pink-Walled Sister Houses Drawn as a Series of Lines

Nosara has become shorthand for a certain kind of tropical living: surf in the morning, yoga at noon, a house in the trees for everything else. That demand has filled the Guiones jungle with villas that often look interchangeable, usually a white box with a pool and a lot of glass. Linea House, completed in 2024 by Instinto Estudio under lead architects Laura Morelli, Alejandro Gonzalez and Cesar Coto, takes a different route. It is two sister houses, 712 m² in total, that share one design language and organize themselves around a simple idea: architecture as a set of lines that frame the jungle instead of walling it out.

What interests us here is not one signature gesture but the discipline of the system. Dark frames, timber slats, deep cantilevered eaves and planted terraces read as horizontal and vertical strokes drawn across the site. Between them sit curved, terracotta-pink walls that soften the grid and give the houses a warmth you rarely see in coastal Costa Rica. The lines do practical work too. They shade, they channel continuous cross-ventilation, and they carve out the voids and courtyards where a Canadian family and their friends can gather without sealing themselves into air-conditioned rooms.

Arrival Through Screens and Shadows

The entrance sets the tone. A tall timber slat screen stands in front of pink tile walls, and palm shadows fall across the gravel drive, so the facade works more like a filter than a front door. You read the house first through what it lets pass: light, air, the outline of trees.

The gravel passage between the volumes is the strongest image of the project's logic. Dark-framed pink boxes, planted terraces and timber screens line up like a street in miniature, with the low sun pushing through the canopy at the far end. Overhead, a slatted timber canopy against palm fronds and open sky shows how the line motif extends into the roof edge, cutting the tropical sun into bands rather than blocking it outright.

Living Rooms That Open to the Terrace

The common rooms sit on the ground floor, and they behave less like interiors than covered extensions of the garden. A wood plank ceiling runs over a low gray sofa and round timber tables, and sliding glass opens the room straight onto a dining terrace. When those panels are pulled back, the living room and the terrace become one shaded floor plate.

The kitchen continues the approach. Sage cabinetry, a timber island and woven stools give it a relaxed surf-house register, while sunlight striping the pale floor confirms that the screens are doing their job. Taller Ken's interiors stay restrained, letting timber, terrazzo and earth tones carry the mood instead of decorative objects. A long amber pendant over the five-stool island is about as theatrical as it gets, and that is the right call for a house meant to be lived in barefoot.

Stairs as Light Instruments

The stairs are where Instinto Estudio is most generous with light. A timber stair with recessed wall lights runs past a round window that frames a palm courtyard over a bed of river stones, turning a circulation zone into a viewing room. Higher up, a timber-framed skylight throws long bands of sunlight and shadow down the plastered walls, so the line motif keeps moving through the day.

The circular wall opening onto a concrete stair with a red metal handrail is the most graphic moment in the set. It works as a counterpoint to all the straight lines: one round cut that turns the stair into a picture. These openings also hint at how air moves through the houses, with voids and apertures placed so breezes can travel vertically as well as across.

Curves in a House of Lines

For a project named after the line, Linea House leans on the curve more than you might expect. Seen from above, a pink concrete handrail bends along a stair surrounded by dense planting, its color close enough to the soil and the bark that it reads as part of the garden.

The outdoor shower makes the same argument at body scale. A curved terracotta-pink plaster wall wraps the space, a copper pipe rises against it, and leaves crowd the foreground. Here the enclosure is not about privacy alone; it is about making washing an outdoor ritual, and the curve is what makes the space feel held rather than boxed in.

Bedrooms and Baths at a Smaller Scale

The private rooms trade the openness of the ground floor for a darker, cooler register. A teak bunk bed with a curved headboard panel stands against a dark wall beside a black steel post, a detail that shows the structure without making a show of it. The bunks also suggest who this house is for: a family that expects friends, kids and long stays.

In the bathroom, a terrazzo basin, a vertical tile splashback and a round wall lamp reprise the palette and the circle motif from the stair. It is a small room, but it is consistent, and that consistency is what lets two separate houses feel like siblings.

Plans and Drawings

The plans clarify what the photographs only suggest. At Level 1, two mirrored volumes sit around a driveway courtyard inside a walled lot, with dense tree canopy drawn around them. At Level 2, bedroom volumes and planted terraces arrange themselves around a central court, so the upper floor reads as a set of rooms floating among the trees.

The sections are where the climate strategy becomes legible. A cantilevered upper floor shades the ground-level dining terrace below, and the sectional perspective cuts through both volumes to show planted roof terraces, a central palm courtyard and a sunken plunge pool. The voids between the volumes are not leftover space; they are the lungs of the project.

Why This Project Matters

Nosara's building boom has made tropical modernism feel like a catalogue. Linea House shows that a clear organizing idea can still produce something specific. By treating eaves, screens and frames as lines that do climatic work, Instinto Estudio gets shade, cross-ventilation and gathering space from the same moves, and it reduces the need for mechanical cooling in a place where most new houses default to it.

The pink walls deserve credit too. They tie the houses to the earth tones of the site, they give the curves something to say against the grid, and they prove that a restrained palette does not have to be a beige one. For anyone designing in hot, humid climates, the lesson is direct: let the architecture shape the air and the light first, and the atmosphere follows.

Linea House by Instinto Estudio (lead architects Laura Morelli, Alejandro Gonzalez and Cesar Coto), Nosara, Costa Rica. Area: 712 m². Year: 2024. Photography by Alvaro Fonseca (Depth Lens).

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.