Villa Ansara

Three-bedroom villa in Zanzibar built across two floors. Open-plan ground level with floor-to-ceiling glass onto the garden; bedrooms upstairs, each with their own terrace. Modern tropical detailing: white walls, dark timber, deep eaves to handle the equatorial sun. 158m² build on a generous 1,110m² plot.

Villa Ansara is a three-bedroom design for a site in Zanzibar, Tanzania, drawn in the same Modern Tropical language Balitecture uses in Bali. Grey stone panels clad the boundary walls and parts of the house, long low roofs project well past the walls on timber soffits, and upstairs the bedrooms sit behind full-height screens of vertical timber slats, with grasses planted along the ledge below.

The ground floor is one open room behind floor-to-ceiling glass, with the kitchen, a dining table and a lounge all opening onto a covered terrace and a timber deck beside the pool, which is lined in blue mosaic. Across the garden, a separate open-sided pavilion with a hip roof on timber posts shelters a round dining table under woven pendants, among monstera and palms.

The bedrooms have dark timber ceilings, ceiling fans and woven plates arranged on the wall above the beds. The bathrooms use large dark grey tiles, black-framed shower screens and timber vanities, and one opens onto a planted courtyard with a freestanding tub on pebbles. The renders also show the approach, a stone-paved lane under trees with covered walkways leading to the front doors. At 1,110 square metres, the plot is large against 158 square metres of floor area, and most of it is given over to garden.

• Grey stone cladding on the walls and boundaries
• Vertical timber screens across the upper-floor bedrooms
• Open-plan ground floor behind floor-to-ceiling glass
• Blue mosaic pool beside a timber deck
• Separate hip-roofed dining pavilion in the garden
• Courtyard bathroom with a freestanding tub on pebbles