Villa Olympea house

Joy Alexandre Harb's Olympea House operates as a profound meditation on the archetypes of sanctuary and prospect, encoding within its spatial organization the fundamental human desire for protected dwelling with commanding view, the cave-like security of enclosed stone chambers opening onto elevated platforms surveying vast territory below. The chromatic symbolism proves equally rich, with the dominant verdant envelope traditionally associated with renewal, growth, and the generative forces of nature, while the grey-blue stone carries connotations of permanence, geological time, and the enduring mineral realm that transcends human temporality. The aquamarine pool functions as symbolic threshold, the liminal water element marking transition between terrestrial dwelling and aerial suspension, its infinity edge creating visual merger with distant horizon and sky realm beyond. Timber elements introduce warmth and organic life into the lithic vocabulary, wood carrying associations of shelter, craft, and human transformation of natural material into protective architecture. The cascading waterfall operates as powerful symbol of life force, the eternal flow suggesting abundance, purification, and the ceaseless movement of vital energy through the dwelling space. The stepped approach creates ritualized procession, the descent through successive terraces functioning as threshold sequence preparing consciousness for arrival at the contemplative platform of the pool terrace. Green roof integration dissolves the boundary between building and earth, suggesting return and continuity, the structure becoming hill, the architecture achieving camouflage within its generative landscape context. The geometric ordering of nature through terraced gardens and orthogonal beds speaks to human desire for measured relationship with organic profusion, the dialogue between wild forest and cultivated platform encoding fundamental tensions between nature and culture that architecture perpetually negotiates.

The Residential Villa in the mountains of Lebanon is integrated with its surrounding nature. Its design consists of 2 L-shaped structures on the ground floor, which interact together to create an internal green patio, visible from all spaces in the house. This concept was thought of in order to avoid having corridors in the house, for aesthetic reasons as well as for avoiding loss of space. A cedar tree was planted in the internal patio,it being the emblem of the country found on the national flag , becoming the heart of the house.