“Moldova is a land of hills,” Mirza reminds, this embeddedness is literal as well as symbolic. The three domed cabins are half-buried into the lakeshore’s natural contours, each opening out to the water through a large panoramic window. Each house reads as terrain, or form that emerges from it, its green roof blending with the surrounding grassland. “To disappear into the landscape,” Mirza says, “means making architecture that is listens—responsive to site, culture, and ecology. Nature itself becomes the protagonist.”
That responsiveness was not confined to design. The process of building, Mirza emphasizes, was a continuous conversation between architects, craftspeople, and site conditions. “Knowledge exchanges happened daily—about joinery details, clay mixes, or how to craft ergonomic furniture from local timber.” Specialists trained the team in straw-bale and clay plaster techniques, while interiors—ceramic lamps, timber beds, tactile finishes—emerged through collaborations with the local furniture studio Lemnaria and artist Eugenia Burlacenko.
“This kind of mutual learning revived skills and built strong community bonds,” Mirza notes. The project thus became part workshop, part revival of Moldova’s nearly forgotten material traditions. The studio conceived, funded, and realized the project independently as a signature initiative; a gesture of architectural entrepreneurship. The return on investment, calculated at just 150 days, proved something rare: that slow craft can still be smart business.