Belle Vue

The villa has a simple and difficult quirk. All its main rooms face due south, over the bay. The back-light is permanent. Materials read against the sun vanish, dark colours close in, volumes flatten into silhouettes.

We built the palette from that constraint. Broken but pale tones, never solid black, plenty of off-white and pearl grey. The marked colours are concentrated on textiles laid as horizontal fields: an amber rug in the living room, a terracotta throw on the main bedroom.

Indirect lighting was treated as a layer of its own. LED strips in the ceiling cove, table lamps on every corner, pendants at mid-height that light the table rather than the faces. The point is to rebalance the room late in the day, when the blue gives way to grey and natural light runs out.

The sheers, off-white in heavy linen, filter the sun without blocking it. They glide on tracks recessed into the ceiling to keep the window line unbroken. Furniture sits set back from the bay doors so it does not melt into the back-light: one metre of margin, everywhere.