Studio Saxe Tucks a Guanacaste House into a Ravine Slope and Lets the Landscape Reveal It in Fragments

Most hillside houses in coastal Guanacaste are built to be seen. They sit on the ridge, glass toward the Pacific, and treat the slope as a pedestal. Casa Akíga, completed in 2025 by Studio Saxe in Cabo Velas, does something less common. The studio pressed the house into a site that drops toward a ravine. From the street you see only fragments of it, and the rest unfolds as you move down and through. At 1,347 m², this is a large private residence. The way it withholds itself is the most interesting thing about it.

The project is organized as two volumes joined by a bridge. It is anchored to the ground by heavy stone walls and lifted above it by a thin, cantilevered timber roof. That tension between rooted and floating runs through every scale, from the site plan to the stair treads. Studio Saxe handled architecture, interiors and landscape together under design director Benjamin Saxe. The result reads as one continuous argument about how a house can let the land go first.

An Arrival Built on Withholding

The approach sets the terms. A timber boardwalk with steel cable railings threads through tropical planting toward a low pavilion. The roof edge is the first thing you register, and the building mass comes later. The entry courtyard continues this with stepping stones across pebbles and planted beds under the overhang. Behind a pivot glass door and black steel columns, the entry hall still holds back the view. A gravel courtyard is glimpsed through the glazing instead.

Seen from the front, the house is a sequence of layers: cacti, a weathering steel planter, a stone pier and stair, then a sloped wood-lined roof. The slatted timber screens filter the volumes rather than exposing them. They work as a facade that would rather blur into the flowering shrubs and palms than compete with them. We think this restraint matters more than any single detail. The house is designed so that you build the image of it in your head, piece by piece.

A Flat Roof Among the Canopy

From a distance, the strategy becomes legible. The flat roof plane sits above dense forest and reads as a horizontal line, while the walls disappear into the trees. The aerial view shows how much of the site the canopy still claims, with the house and a solar-panel outbuilding set in the forest beside a curving road. The panels are a visible sustainability gesture. They are kept on a separate structure so the main roof stays clean and thin.

Up close, the vertical timber slats and narrow wooden walkway pick up the rhythm of the tall, bare-branched trees around them. In Guanacaste's dry season, when much of the forest drops its leaves, that sympathy with the trunks is a smart reading of the place. It is not decoration.

Stone Below, Steel Across

The rough stone walls are where the house grips the slope. An open-tread timber stair climbs beside one of them, with a stone sink and pebble planting bed at its foot. From the landing, a stone-lined void opens toward the terrace, the hills and the sea beyond. This is the moment the withholding pays off. The view is framed by mass on both sides, so it arrives with weight instead of simply being available everywhere.

The bridge connecting the two volumes is the project's defining element, and it is detailed lightly on purpose. A steel-framed walkway with black railings spans above the stone wall and timber deck. It carries movement across the terrain without asking the terrain to change. Below, a covered deck catches dappled tree shadows across its boards. The heavy and the light are kept distinct, and you always know which part of the house belongs to the ground and which part hovers over it.

Terraces That Face the Ravine

The social core turns outward on the downhill side. A covered terrace with ceiling fans, lounge seating and an open kitchen sits beside an infinity pool, under a wood ceiling that extends into the cantilevered roof. The pool edge drops the foreground away so that the forested hills appear to start right at the water. A stone column in the foreground reminds you that this openness rests on something solid.

The secondary terraces are more domestic: a plunge pool edged by planters, surfboards on the wall, low sofas under fans with a dining area beyond the glass. In this climate, the covered outdoor room is the real living room. The deep timber soffits and cross-ventilated spaces suggest the studio designed for shade and air movement first, then for the view.

Interiors Sunk into the Section

Inside, the section keeps working. The double-height living room drops into a sunken sofa pit beneath a skylight, with glass globe pendants hanging overhead. Lowering the seating does two things. It brings the body closer to the ground the house is embedded in, and it lets the ceiling read as one continuous timber plane with the roof outside. The kitchen, with its marble-clad island and striped timber wall, sits on the same open floor and keeps the living spaces flowing together.

The secondary rooms show the handcrafted streak Studio Saxe often pursues. There is a woven-brick media wall, a floating wood console, and a wood slat ceiling over a long shuffleboard table under a painted canvas. These are family rooms with real personality. They avoid the neutral resort palette that so many Costa Rican villas settle for.

Bedrooms Opened to Trees and Hills

The children's rooms are some of the most specific spaces in the house. Wooden bunk beds have built-in stairs and drawers, a hanging chair sits beside a sliding door, and fish wallpaper and a glass wall are hung with trailing vines. Here the landscape is pulled right up against the glass rather than held at a distance.

The adult bedrooms each take on their own color: a teal patterned wall with a walnut headboard, a gold textured wall with a quilted bedspread. All of them share sliding glass doors that open to a tree, a terrace or the forested hills. The shared move is simple and effective. Every room gets a direct threshold to the outside, and the shell's material discipline leaves room for the interiors to be playful.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan clarifies the logic. A main building is organized around courtyards, a smaller separate volume sits nearby, and trees are placed carefully among the contours. The cross-section shows the two-level house under a wide floating roof. A stone retaining wall takes the load of the hill so the roof above can stay light.

The longitudinal section is the clearest diagram of the project. The house steps down the slope under a segmented roof, with the stone wall holding the lowest level. The hand-drawn concept sketch, with its sun arrow, wind arrows and hovering roof plane, shows that the roof started as a climatic device for shade and breeze before it became a formal one.

Why This Project Matters

Casa Akíga is a useful counterexample on a coastline crowded with houses that compete for visibility. Studio Saxe shows that a large residence can sink into its slope and still deliver the ocean view. The house hides from the street, lets the landscape take precedence, and stages the view as a slow discovery. In return, the sea feels earned, and the forest stays the dominant presence on the hill.

The broader lesson is about division of labor. Stone does the grounding, steel does the spanning, and timber does the sheltering. Each material stays in its role, and that clarity is what lets a 1,347 m² house feel light. For architects working on tropical slopes, the project is a reminder that section and roof, more than glass, are the real tools for making a building belong to its site.

Casa Akíga by Studio Saxe (architecture, interiors and landscape; design director Benjamin Saxe), Cabo Velas, Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Area: 1,347 m². Completed 2025. Builder: Frame Construction. Structural engineering: Sotela Alfaro Ltda. Photography by Thibault Cartier.

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