A Dream House in Bahrein

In 1988, we were invited to Bahrain, to design a seaside residence for Rashid, son of the Emir. A coastal dream house, designed to host parties and events for the son of the Emir of Bahrain. It was conceived as a large cloud that is mirrored in the immense swimming pools that face it and slope down towards the sea, where they interface with a lagoon and with an islet that protects the small harbour from the waves. The fact that the client, over and above the listing of the rooms he wanted, had given us no instructions vis-à-vis the desired architectural solutions – he only asked us to design a dream house devoted to entertaining guests – afforded us the opportunity for a new meditation on aesthetics. Abandoning the geometries of orthogonal axes, we decided to throw ourselves into a freer composition of open and continuous spaces, based on the introduction of a triangular scheme that allowed us to make unconstrained use of circular contours, while maintaining visual axes, focal points and proportions.