The Villajoyosa project as the visualisations show it

Our Spanish project, Villajoyosa Residence, is located in Villajoyosa on the Costa Blanca, in the province of Alicante, along the coast from Benidorm. It is at the design stage. What exists today is a set of project visualisations, and this article does one thing: it reads those drawings and says what they contain. Everything below is a description of images, not a report from a site.

The sea, the palms and the Benidorm skyline

The first thing the visualisations establish is where the building stands in relation to the water. The residence is drawn near the sea, with the towers of Benidorm reading as a skyline in the middle distance rather than as a neighbour. That silhouette is the clue to the location for anyone who knows the coast, and the drawings use it deliberately: the viewer is meant to understand that this is the quieter side of a well-known stretch of shoreline.

Palms sit in the foreground of several views, at the level of the entrance and around the pool. In Mediterranean drawings that detail is easy to dismiss as decoration, but it carries information about the design intention. Planting at that scale implies ground given over to landscape rather than to parking, and shade treated as part of the architecture instead of an afterthought.

Behind the building the mountains close the composition. The renders show the site as a place with two directions worth facing: the water on one side and the hills on the other. How much of that reaches the finished rooms depends on the orientation of each flat, which is exactly the sort of thing a design stage exists to resolve.

The building, the pool and the roof

The residential volume in the drawings is light, with open facades and deep terraces. The interior views continue the same idea: pale surfaces, large glazing, rooms that are lit from the long side and furnished sparely. Nothing in the visualisations suggests a heavy or closed building; the whole intention on the page is a structure organised around its openings.

At ground level the drawings show a pool with sunbeds alongside it, set in the landscaped part of the plot rather than squeezed against a boundary. It is the social centre of the scheme as drawn, and the sightlines in the renders run through it towards the sea.

The roof is used. The visualisations show terraces on top of the building facing two ways, towards the city and towards the mountains, with places to sit out. In a coastal project that is often where the most valuable space in the scheme ends up, and giving it to the residents collectively rather than to a single flat is a decision visible in the drawings.

What the master plan sets out

Alongside the perspective views there is a master plan, and it is the more informative drawing of the two kinds. It fixes the pool, a padel court and the walking paths through the grounds, which together say how the shared part of the project is meant to be used: swimming, one sport with a court of its own, and a route through the planting that is not a pavement beside a road.

Read next to our other projects, that layout is recognisable. We plan the ground between buildings as a space with a purpose, and the padel court plays the role here that a playground and a fountain play in a district elsewhere. The elements are chosen for the place and the climate; the approach of designing the shared ground rather than leaving it over is the part that is constant.

A master plan at this stage also shows its own limits. It sets out what is shared and roughly where it sits. It does not settle the surfaces, the lighting, the species of the planting or the detail of the pool edge. Those come later, and they are the decisions that determine whether the finished grounds resemble the drawing.

Where a visualisation stops

A render is a statement of intention. It is drawn from a design that is still being worked on, by people whose job is to make the intention legible. It is not a photograph and it is not a commitment. We publish these images because they are the honest current state of the project, and we would rather show the drawings and say so than wait and then present them as something else.

So the limits are worth naming directly. The Villajoyosa project is not built, not completed and not on sale. We are not putting a completion date, a price or a stage of readiness on this page, because those belong in documents and the documents are not finished. When they are, they will be the basis for what we say next about the project.

What can be said now is who is behind the drawings. SAVO has been building since 2006, works the full cycle in-house from the plot through design and construction to commissioning and the territory afterwards, and runs projects in Spain, Lithuania and Ukraine. Villajoyosa is the Spanish one, at the stage where everything still exists on paper. Enquiries can be sent to [email protected].