New Giza Villa

The brief

This villa in New Giza is designed as a quiet, natural home rather than a showpiece. NoVi's interior design takes in the whole of the house as the renders show it: the entrance, a double-height living room and a second lounge, the dining room, a curved staircase, the kitchen, a bedroom with its dressing wall, the bathrooms and a powder room, down to the utility room.

The challenge

Natural, hand-finished interiors are easy to overdo: too much rough texture and a house feels rustic and heavy; too little and it turns bland. The balance has to hold across very different rooms — tall, light-filled living spaces with large windows, a working kitchen, compact bathrooms — while raw materials such as reclaimed timber and stone still meet the practical demands of daily family life.

Our approach

The design starts from the envelope. Soft lime-plaster walls, carved niches and arched openings give the house its calm, and tall black-framed arched windows pull the landscape into the living room. Against that pale backdrop the heavier pieces stand out: reclaimed-timber beams and tables, a live-edge wood mirror in the entrance, and a sculptural plaster staircase that curves around an indoor tree.

The same vocabulary is tuned to each room. The kitchen sets reclaimed-timber cabinetry against a veined marble island with a raw-edge timber counter; the bedroom stays soft, with a slatted timber ceiling and sheer linen; the bathrooms turn darker and more enveloping, with stacked-stone walls, a black freestanding tub and organic mirrors.