House in Sassandra

Sassandra is a coastal town in Côte d’Ivoire, historically rooted in fishing and now gradually opening to tourism. Located six hours from Abidjan, the project responds to a brief for a guesthouse designed for a new generation of visitors. The site is compact—23 by 19 meters—with a steep slope overlooking the Gulf of Guinea. The house is conceived as a sequence of three spatial moments. Arrival is marked by a long, enclosed corridor built in locally made earth bricks. This compressed entrance leads to a central space, where a circular void opens the ground plane, revealing a pool and reconnecting the architecture to the natural terrain. Due to recurring floods, the structure is elevated on stilts, creating a shaded, permeable living space beneath the main slab. This proposal was developed at preliminary design stage.