Discovery
A village scale of hospitality.
At HOSHINOYA Taketomi Island, Rie Azuma uses walls, thresholds and separate rooflines to give a contemporary resort the spatial intelligence of a village.
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THE WHV WORLD
Homes & Estates
Architecture, land and a sense of place.
Our perspective on Homes & Estates
THE QUESTION WE BRING
What is exceptional here, and what does owning it actually involve?
OUR FIELD OF VIEW
- Architectural homes
- Villas and estates
- Vineyards and productive land
Each selection begins with a specific subject, a reason to care and evidence worth examining.
In view.
Discovery
The cloister with a next chapter.
At Santo Estevo in Galicia, a former monastery has become a hotel without making its cloisters irrelevant. The attraction is the conversation between different uses of the same building.
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Discovery
A room that teaches you to see.
At Canova’s Gypsotheca in Possagno, Carlo Scarpa made daylight part of the collection. The building changes how the plaster sculptures can be understood.
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Discovery
The work behind an open room.
Villa Tugendhat’s apparent ease has machinery behind it. Seeing both the living space and the technical floor makes Mies van der Rohe’s Brno house more interesting, not less.
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Discovery
A second life inside Breuer’s concrete.
Hotel Marcel turns a former office building by Marcel Breuer into a place to stay. Its strongest proposition is that preservation and demanding new performance can be pursued together.
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Discovery
The building that borrows the shore.
Löyly’s timber envelope is a screen, a silhouette and a set of places to look out. Avanto’s Helsinki sauna gives an everyday tradition an unusually public architectural form.
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Discovery
The library that makes room to stay.
At Vennesla, twenty-seven timber ribs do more than shape a roof. Helen & Hard’s library turns a public service into a place people can inhabit together.
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Discovery
The museum that gives the roof to the city.
Amos Rex puts its galleries underground and makes their roof a public landscape. Helsinki gains an art museum without losing the life of the square above it.
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Discovery
The residents who kept the idea alive.
Walden 7 is more than a striking red building. Its residents’ account reveals an architectural experiment that survived through repair, organisation and continued habitation.
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Discovery
Repair without erasing the break.
Berlin’s Neues Museum shows another way to bring a damaged building back. Old fabric and new intervention remain distinguishable without making the place unusable.
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Discovery
A town hall you can stay with.
Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall brings public life, a courtyard and places to stay into one brick ensemble. Its architecture can still be encountered through use.
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Discovery
A building that filters the sky.
Peter Zumthor’s Kunsthaus Bregenz is more than a glass box. Its envelope turns daylight into part of the experience of looking at art.
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Discovery
A monument that still goes to work.
The Fagus factory in Alfeld helped change the language of industrial architecture. Its continuing working life matters as much as its glass corners.
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Discovery
The house that could be assembled again.
Aluminaire House began as a 1931 argument for industrially made housing. Its reconstruction in Palm Springs gives that unfinished argument a visible second life.
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Discovery
The villa that needed another life.
Villa Empain in Brussels is more than a restored Art Deco interior. Its continuing public life shows what preservation has to do after the photographs are taken.
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Discovery
A building that lowers the threshold.
Snøhetta’s Maggie’s Aberdeen puts thoughtful architecture at the service of people affected by cancer. Its purpose is more important than its sculptural outline.
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Discovery
A theatre that still needs an audience.
Bayreuth’s Margravial Opera House is a remarkable preserved theatre. Its living value becomes clearer when you distinguish looking at the room from hearing a performance in it.
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Discovery
A room that knows where to look.
At Juvet in Norway, privacy comes partly from the direction a room faces. The landscape is not a decorative backdrop added after the building.
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Discovery
The vineyard that stayed together.
In a region famous for divided vineyard ownership, Clos de Tart offers another story. Its continuity is a useful way to understand what a place-name on a bottle can mean.
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Discovery
The work behind keeping art.
Rotterdam’s Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen turns art storage into a public encounter. The most important exhibit may be the work that keeps a collection alive.
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Discovery
A way of looking that remains.
Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage is more than a photogenic black house. Its garden and working rooms show how attention can turn an unlikely setting into a creative world.
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Discovery
The terminal you can stay with.
The TWA Flight Center no longer needs to function as its original airline terminal to remain an extraordinary place to arrive.
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Discovery
A city within the books.
At Mexico City’s Biblioteca Vasconcelos, suspended bookshelves make knowledge feel like a landscape you can enter.
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Discovery
The space inside the silos.
At Zeitz MOCAA, an extraordinary entrance was carved from a structure designed to hold grain. The old tubes become the starting point for a new public interior.
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Discovery
A home without a resale thesis.
Barcelona’s La Borda separates the right to inhabit a home from the right to sell it. Its architecture is only half of the experiment.
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Discovery
The bucket you can step inside.
Shuji Nakagawa scaled the logic of a wooden bucket into a tea room. The result asks whether a declining everyday craft can find a larger future without losing its structure.
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Discovery
A garden above a difficult history.
The St. Pauli bunker carries a public garden above a wartime structure. Its value depends on making room for present-day life without allowing the planting to conceal how the building began.
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Discovery
A garden for an apartment.
Habitat 67 stacks homes without surrendering the idea of a private terrace. Almost six decades later, its strongest argument is that people still live inside the experiment.
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Discovery
The wall between velvet and metal.
Levantina brings Tessitura Bevilacqua velvet into Materica’s metal-surface world. Its appeal lies in the friction between two material traditions, not a generic claim of Venetian luxury.
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Discovery
The shopping mall that became a lagoon.
At Tainan Spring, the remains of a shopping mall help frame a sunken public landscape. The useful inheritance is not another shop, but another way for the city to occupy the site.
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Discovery
A chapel that leaves room for the sky.
Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus chapel stands in a field rather than at the centre of a grand complex. Its scale, changing light and continuing devotional purpose give the architecture more than a striking silhouette.
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Discovery
The station still sets a table.
Le Train Bleu turns a railway connection into an occasion to sit down. Its continuing value lies not only overhead in the painted rooms, but in the use and service that keep those rooms alive.
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Discovery
A timber tower with a public life.
Sara Kulturhus in northern Sweden brings a hotel, a library, theatre and art into one timber building. Its most interesting scale is not just upwards, but outwards into the daily life of a city.
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Discovery
The pattern is the joinery.
Tanihata’s kumiko screens make a geometric pattern from fitted pieces of wood rather than a surface decoration. Light passes through the result, making an old joining skill useful in contemporary rooms.
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Discovery
A circle inside another century.
The Bourse de Commerce in Paris keeps its historical envelope while making room for a contemporary collection. The new intervention is interesting because it makes the older building more visible, not less.
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Discovery
A modern house recovered from its traces.
Villa Cavrois looks remarkably assured for a house once abandoned and vandalised. Its restoration reveals how much knowledge is needed to recover an architectural idea, not simply repair its walls.
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Discovery
A power plant with another public life.
CopenHill puts a recreational landscape on a working waste-to-energy plant. The valuable idea is a second use for an industrial roof, not an architectural image being mistaken for proof of carbon neutrality.
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Discovery
The structure becomes the architecture.
Morpheus in Macau turns its load-bearing exterior into the building’s identity. The spectacle becomes more interesting when you understand what that lattice makes possible inside.
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Discovery
A moving room for an Italian journey.
La Dolce Vita Orient Express turns rebuilt Italian railway carriages into an encounter with contemporary hospitality and mid-century design. The journey, not just the destination, becomes the occasion.
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Discovery
A bridge you walk through for art.
At Kistefos in Norway, BIG’s The Twist is both crossing and gallery. A ninety-degree turn makes wall, ceiling and riverbank part of the same architectural question.
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Discovery
An art collection you can spend the night in.
The Fife Arms in Braemar brings contemporary art into a former Scottish coaching inn. The interesting encounter is not a celebrity guest list, but the possibility of living briefly alongside works rather than filing past them.
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Discovery
The ironworks that became a park.
At Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, blast furnaces and loading structures remain part of a public landscape. A place built for production acquired another kind of usefulness.
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Discovery
The vineyard woven against the wind.
Santorini’s low, coiled vines are more than a striking landscape. The kouloura makes a practical response to wind and sun visible in the wine’s agricultural life.
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Discovery
The room that keeps being played.
Vienna’s Musikverein Golden Hall is not only a famous interior. Its continuing concert life offers something more useful than a postcard: a reason to sit, listen and return.
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Discovery
The station you can sleep in.
Canfranc’s former international station has another life as a hotel. The interesting luxury is not a star rating, but the possibility of inhabiting an ambitious railway building again.
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Discovery
The museum you borrow a key to.
In Giornico, La Congiunta begins with a key collected from a local osteria. A small concrete museum gives architecture, sculpture and the visitor’s own attention an unusually direct relationship.
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Discovery
The courtyard between the laboratories.
At the Salk Institute, Louis Kahn placed a remarkable open court between working laboratories. Its value is more than a view towards the Pacific: a place for science that also makes room for thought.
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Discovery
The wine picked berry by berry.
Tokaji Aszú makes sweetness a question of selection, concentration and balance. The individual berry opens a much richer story than the age on a label.
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Discovery
The house that found another daily life.
Chiiori in Japan’s Iya valley preserves a thatched house through another form of use. A bookable stay makes the relationship between old fabric, modern comfort and continuing care tangible.
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Discovery
The home with a riveted shell.
An aluminium Airstream turns a recognisable shell into a place to live while travelling. Behind the image is a practical question about how much home a journey needs.
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Discovery
A house built for daily life.
Villa Necchi Campiglio pairs Milanese architectural presence with lifts, service routes and a private pool. Its most revealing details concern how a house actually worked.
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Discovery
The value of what stays out.
Ridge’s account of the 2025 Monte Bello blend makes exclusion visible. An individually promising lot may still be wrong for the wine being assembled.
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Discovery
A building you enter through water.
Peter Zumthor’s thermal baths at Vals turn local quartzite, light and water into architecture a visitor experiences bodily. The place does not need to be owned to matter.
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Discovery
The palace behind the bottle.
At Fécamp, Bénédictine joins a liqueur, a distillery and an art collection in one extravagant place. The nineteenth-century story is more revealing than a medieval-looking facade.
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Discovery
The library that lets you make.
Helsinki’s Oodi offers books, workshops, studios and public rooms. The unusual value is how much a city lets people do without owning the building or equipment.
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Discovery
A skill you can build.
A dry-stone walling course turns a landscape feature into a skill you can practice. The value is in the work learned, not only the scenery.
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Discovery
The building that keeps its ruins.
Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba does not clear away the history beneath it. The museum lets visitors move among the remains and the new building.
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Discovery
The orchard in a glass.
Christian Drouin VSOP makes the route from cider apples to copper stills and used casks visible. A bottle can become a way to understand a place.
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Discovery
A house designed down to the light.
At Maison Louis Carré, the furniture, materials, rooms and landscape belong to one conversation. It remains a place a visitor can study.
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Discovery
The vineyard in the sand.
Arenae Ramisco begins with an unusual vineyard practice near the Atlantic. The sand, labour and cooperative are part of the bottle.
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Discovery
The architecture below your feet.
At Rani-ki-Vav in Gujarat, the descent toward water became architecture and sculpture. The old practical purpose still changes how we read it.
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Discovery
When a house remembers a garden.
At Casa Vicens, flowers and palm leaves become tile and iron. Gaudí’s early house offers a more concrete lesson than the word iconic.
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Discovery
A mill that kept a place alive.
Saltaire is more than a handsome mill. Its buildings show how a place can retain its identity while making room for entirely different work.
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Discovery
A house that changes with the day.
At the Rietveld Schröder House, moving a wall changes the relationship between privacy and shared life. The radical part is still useful.
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Discovery
A building that shows its work.
A century after its 1926 opening, the Bauhaus Building in Dessau is still a useful place to ask how an institution makes its ideas visible.
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Discovery
A factory that learned to make public life.
At Sesc Pompeia in São Paulo, Lina Bo Bardi made an existing industrial structure useful to an entirely different kind of city life.
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Discovery
A salt factory with a second life.
At Arc-et-Senans, Claude Nicolas Ledoux gave salt production the presence of a monumental civic project. Today you can walk into its unfinished argument.
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Discovery
Read the second date on the Armagnac.
Darroze’s Domaine de Rieston 1996 shows why the estate, vintage and bottling date belong in the same sentence.
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Discovery
Can Lis: a house you can learn from.
You do not need to own Jørn Utzon’s Mallorcan house to take something lasting from it.
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Discovery
A night inside an architectural idea.
At La Tourette, a former friar’s cell offers a way to encounter Le Corbusier’s architecture at the pace of a stay.
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Discovery
A ruin made room for living.
Astley Castle lets people inhabit a protected ruin because the new architecture makes its losses visible rather than pretending them away.
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Discovery
A home woven into a wall.
The Frafra Tapestry project translates a family compound in northern Ghana into a work woven by the people who know its spaces.
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Discovery
The value beneath the bark.
Herdade da Baliza shows why productive land should be read through ecology, operating decisions and public scrutiny, not acreage alone.
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Discovery
A house designed around a life.
At E-1027, Eileen Gray made furniture, privacy and the movement of daily life part of the architecture.
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Discovery
When an entrepreneur buys a vineyard.
Michael Baum and Julie Carabello acquired Château de Pommard in 2014. The interesting investment question begins after the purchase.
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Discovery
The inn that counts what stays.
Fogo Island Inn turns a remarkable building into a harder question: how much value remains in the place that creates the experience?
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Discovery
The house that needs its caretakers.
Fallingwater’s extraordinary relationship with its landscape also explains why enduring architecture depends on less visible work.
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Discovery
The land behind the bottle.
Familija Estate in Slovenia offers a useful shift of perspective: from wanting a bottle to understanding the place and work behind it.
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