Azenya Villas in Nuwara Eliya: four compact gable-roofed cabins on a slope in the tea highlands

What was built

Azenya Villas is a cluster of four compact holiday villas on a hillside in Nuwara Eliya, in the central highlands of Sri Lanka. The development is set into terraced vegetable fields and montane forest.

The core idea of the project

The project was developed during the country's economic crisis. According to the original source, the key brief from the client and the architects was stated with utmost directness: keep construction costs at the lowest possible level without sacrificing the quality of the experience of being in this place.

The architectural response

The solution is a simple gable form with a small footprint. Rather than sprawling across the site, the volume develops vertically, and the same approach is repeated, forming a series of identical structures.

• •compact footprint on the ground;
• •vertical development instead of horizontal;
• •a repeatable typology as a way to save on design and construction;
• •fitting into the existing terraced terrain and the forest mass.

Professional context

*This is general context, not details from the original source.* The typology of "small volume + verticality + repetition" is a standard tool for reducing costs under difficult conditions: the area of foundations and roofing is cut, components and structures are standardized, and repetition makes it possible to perfect a single detail instead of four different ones. For sloped highland sites, it is also a way to minimize earthworks — precisely the cost item that becomes critical under crisis conditions.

The question of structural material (timber, stone, hybrid solutions) is not addressed in the original description — based on the available data, no judgment can be made about it.