The Belgian coast has all the time attracted the marginally surreal — fishermen on horseback, a ship-shaped restaurant, and now, a concrete villa that appears prefer it was carved out of the dune somewhat than constructed on high of it. In Oostduinkerke, on a nook plot on the fringe of a protected dune reserve alongside Belgium’s North Beach, architect Magalie Munters has constructed a house that seems to have emerged from the bottom somewhat than been positioned upon it. Accomplished in 2025, Villa Nouvelle Obscure is 330 sq. metres of sculpted concrete — formed by terrain, wind, and light-weight somewhat than by facade composition.
The identify borrows from the French New Wave cinema motion, and the reference earns its place. There’s something filmic in how the home builds narrative as you progress by means of it — compressed thresholds that open into quantity, gentle sweeping throughout curved partitions, deeply set openings that body the dune panorama like a held shot. That is structure with a standpoint.
Designer: Magalie Munters Structure
From the road, the facade reads as a protecting shell. Munters gave the concrete floor a horizontal grain that remembers the striations left in moist sand when the North Sea withdraws at low tide. The feel shouldn’t be ornamental. It’s a structural character — the floor behaves as if it has been sedimented somewhat than forged. The quantity tapers towards the rear of the plot, a delicate geometric choice that creates a beneficiant backyard whereas permitting daylight to achieve each the southern and western facades concurrently. In a compact constructing, that type of steady gentle is earned, not given.
The bedrooms sit half-buried within the dunes, anchored and sheltered. Above them, the residing area rises towards the horizon — a vertical shaft cuts by means of the mass towards the roof, organizing motion and pulling gentle down by means of the inside. Munters cites Le Corbusier as a touchstone, particularly in how areas contract and broaden, and within the logic of a rooftop solarium that turns the roof into usable terrain. The ceiling shouldn’t be incidental. It descends towards the kitchen, which sits decrease and extra intimate, and rises once more over the principle residing area, the place the curved partitions catch the night gentle with near-tactile presence.
Inside, concrete is a spatial substance, not cladding. The staircase, loos, built-in seating, and kitchen are every conceived as carved components inside the monolithic physique — strong and unadorned. Lime-washed surfaces and sandblasted oak furnishings soften the mineral presence with out undermining it. The rooms really feel much less like interiors and extra like the within of a shell: enclosed, resonant, exact.
Munters describes the strain on the coronary heart of the mission as one between a hidden, extremely managed constructing logic and a extra archaic materials expression. That stress, held somewhat than resolved, is strictly what makes Villa Nouvelle Obscure price learning.
