Design, product and furniture design, interior design and architecture. Everything is a process. This is the active method that the Mexican designer Héctor Esrawe applies to his work and to his team of about 50 professionals that includes architects, graphic and industrial designers, engineers and administrative staff. Based in Latin America, the Esrawe studio has been building its projects in different corners of the world. 

It’s with the sound of traditional Portuguese mosaic paving underfoot that we arrive at this “meeting-point for different realities”. 

“Questa casa non è un albergo” (This house is not a hotel). This statement, which also doubles as an installation occupying one of the walls of Palazzo Daniele, reminds us that this boutique hotel located in Gagliano del Capo, in southern Italy, was designed to provide an experience. Ludovica and Roberto Palomba (Palomba Serafini Associati), the architects responsible for transforming this 19th century aristocratic building, emphasise the idea, acknowledging that “it was paramount to design the experience above all”. 

A residence where amazement provides the epigraph to a mise-en-scène of arts and contrasts, and where monotony has been banished.

They communicate who they are through the space they have created as their home. The exacting details, the ethereal elegance and the restrained use of colour confirm this. 

Located on a hill in Bali, Indonesia, Villa Rumah Fajar leads vernacular architecture into a contemporary world, in an exercise that proves that luxury can also be simple. 

Unusual as a whole and reflecting the local geomorphological profile, ‘Casa na Costa do Castelo’ extends and unfolds as we climb upwards.

Five years after inaugurating Casas Caiadas, Mário Domingues and Paula Cabrito once again demonstrate their love for this town in Portugal's Alentejo region, but this time in the form of an urban refuge.

 An irreverent arrangement of scales, in perfect synchrony with Nature, defines the DNA of a house where geometry and happiness are taken to extremes.

Francisco Garcia de Freitas, Luís Costa Valente, Paulo Vieira Borralho and Rui Velho Didier are the names behind RUA, a studio whose common discourse ‘still under construction’ is based on more horizontal rather than hierarchical collective model.

There, between concrete and stars, the sense of plenitude is absolute, and the only certainty is that the spectacular feel of the building is derived from the strength of nature.

An unrestrained – yet absolutely pleasant and inviting – fraternisation of colours, textures and patterns.