Tips for designing the perfect holiday home

‘A holiday home requires a different approach to a primary residence. It doesn’t focus on how someone lives, but how they wish to unwind.’

The perfect holiday home needs to be both an escape and refuge while also offering one the creature comforts they need. It isn’t an easy task to tick all these boxes. Yet, Rachna Agarwal, Founder and Creative Director, ZOÉRA and Studio IAAD, the former being a boutique practice crafting biospheric residences for globally discerning homeowners, has done so many times over. She shares her tips on designing the perfect holiday home, where the mind is rested and design meets slow living.

When asked how designing a holiday home is different from designing a permanent residence, Agarwal responds, “A holiday home requires a different approach to a primary residence. It doesn’t focus on how someone lives, but how they wish to unwind. One shouldn’t mistake decoration for rest.”

She is quick to point out that every site carries instructions, but the designer must be ready to listen to them. “A hillside slopes towards a particular view for a reason; a coastal plot receives salt-laden wind from a specific direction; a forested plot filters light through a canopy that changes with the season. Ignoring these conditions in favour of a fixed template, whether that template is Mediterranean white walls or alpine timber cladding, produces a house that looks correct in a photograph but feels wrong in the body,” she says, sharing an example.

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She adds, “Working with topography means treating gradient, drainage, and orientation as partners rather than obstacles to be levelled away. A slope can become a series of terraces that step down towards water or a valley, and each platform can be furnished differently, one for quiet reading in dappled shade, another left open for a long lunch table, so that the interior programme follows the land rather than a fixed floor plan. A flat coastal plot, by contrast, might need to build its own variation through raised platforms or sunken courtyards, with furnishing choices, low daybeds, woven screens, a change in flooring material, doing the work of creating incident that the topography does not offer for free.”