Mediterranean Wabi-Sabi Villa — Double-Height Foyer

The brief was simple and very hard: no skirting, no trim, no panel joints. The owner wanted the architecture to read as a single carved object — a Mediterranean wabi-sabi house that felt closer to a Greek-island monastery than a 21st-century villa. Every interior surface had to be a continuous mineral plane.

CALMURA supplied the full finish stack. The two principal volumes — the double-height entry and the mezzanine reading nook — were finished in fine-grade marmorino, factory-tinted to a single warm cream colour and burnished to a soft satin. The mezzanine pocket was painted in a complementary limewash tinted half a step warmer (a quiet ochre) to make the upper plane recede instead of compete. The floor across the whole ground level is microcement laid as a single 320 m² monolithic surface, broken only by the recessed perimeter shadow gap.

The hardest detail was the raised hearth and the deep niche behind the rattan pendants — both built up in render and then trowel-finished in the same marmorino so that the joint between wall, niche and platform is invisible. Three CALMURA application advisers worked alongside the studio’s two senior plasterers for the full eight-week finish phase.

The shipment was a single 20′ GP container from Yantian, consolidated with the application toolkit (trowels, burnishing pads, river stones for the limewash, microcement primer and topcoat). VOC across the entire delivered system tested at < 5 g/L on the per-batch ISO 11890-2 report that shipped with the container.