Villa Caeruleum has no corners. Conceived by Poesis Studio, an architecture and design practice with offices in London and Tirana, Albania, the unrealized concept villa is designed for a hillside above Porto Palermo, on Albania’s Ionian coast, replacing the usual grammar of straight walls and enclosed rooms with a single continuous ellipse. That one decision — a loop instead of a box — ends up shaping almost everything else the design does.
A narrow blue channel cuts into the hillside before opening onto the main elliptical wall, compressing the entrance into a single sightline before the landscape opens back up around it. The sequence is deliberately unresolved at first glance — you’re inside the gesture before you understand its shape.
Between the layers of wall, the design carves a series of intimate outdoor courtyards, where daylight filters through rather than entering directly. It’s a strategy that turns the wall itself into the project’s primary architectural tool — not a boundary that separates inside from outside, but a section of varying thickness that controls how much of the landscape gets let in at any point.
As the ellipse unfolds, it stages a deliberate sequence of views — first toward the sea, then the surrounding mountains, then the open sky — so that movement through the villa becomes a way of reading the Ionian coast in stages rather than all at once. Nothing in the plan is symmetrical enough to give the whole view away from a single point.
Set above Porto Palermo, Villa Caeruleum’s hillside site places it within a small but growing set of concept villas along Albania’s coastline — including a recent signature villa concept in Albania, which uses a similarly restrained material palette to anchor itself into the terrain rather than sit on top of it.
The continuous curved wall also places the project alongside other recent work built around a single unbroken gesture rather than a collection of separate volumes — a spiral house in Buenos Aires works through a related logic, where one folded surface generates the entire plan instead of being added onto after the fact.
Below grade, the interior shifts register entirely: a sunken circular lounge sits beneath a round skylight cut directly into the roof, the only source of daylight in an otherwise dark, saturated blue room. Elsewhere in the plan, a stepped blue channel connects the entrance sequence back to the main ellipse, blurring where the architecture stops and the landscape begins.
As a visualization, Poesis Studio‘s Villa Caeruleum belongs to the same register as the practice’s other unrealized proposals, rendered here by Gracielo Mielli, whose CGI translates the project’s saturated blue palette and its relationship to the dry Ionian hillside into something closer to a mood than a technical drawing.
That entrance channel is easy to walk past in the renders without noticing what it’s doing — narrowing the approach on purpose, so that the moment the ellipse opens up around you lands as a release rather than an arrival.