Casa Enoki — Contemporary Cliffside Retreat Tuned to Dry Tropical Forest
Casa Enoki sits on a steep hillside in Liberia, Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, where dense dry-tropical vegetation drops toward the Pacific. Designed by QBO3 Arquitectos as a luxury house, the residence reads the terrain and turns it into a series of staggered platforms with ocean views. The result is an indoor-outdoor home that treats the surrounding landscape as both boundary and companion.
Light settles over the steep hillside as Casa Enoki steps down through the dry-tropical forest toward the Pacific. Each level catches a different fragment of horizon, vegetation, and sky.
This luxury house in Liberia, in Costa Rica’s Guanacaste Province, is conceived by QBO3 Arquitectos as a series of habitable platforms tuned to the terrain. The project engages its dramatic slope, its primary vegetation, and the ocean climate as core design drivers rather than obstacles. Indoor-outdoor living, tropical materials, and environmental sensitivity guide every move.
Casa Enoki is a private residence within Peninsula Papagayo, where the coastline folds into coves and ridges. The house responds by emerging from the ground with precise geometry, using the horizon line as a compositional datum that anchors each room’s outlook. Instead of cutting the hill into submission, the architecture follows its contours, letting the forest remain present at every level.
Reading The Terrain
The site is a steep, challenging plot embedded in dense dry-tropical vegetation. Rather than overriding that profile, the project treats it as a script.
Habitable platforms are staggered along the existing contours, so circulation traces the natural rise and fall of the land instead of a single dominant axis. This stepped strategy reduces earthwork, preserves mature trees, and maintains the ecological fabric that defines the hillside. The terrain reads as continuous, with the house suspended as a series of measured pauses.
Framing Horizon And Ocean
From the outset, the horizon line acts as a central element in the composition. Every major volume aligns views outward to the Pacific Ocean.
Living areas stretch toward the water with generous openings that dissolve the edge between interior and terrace, so the ocean’s shifting light regulates daily rhythms. Bedrooms sit slightly withdrawn yet still oriented to long, calm views, giving each room a direct relationship to the line where sea and sky meet. The house never turns its back on the coast.
Living Between Interior And Forest
Indoor-outdoor living defines the character of Casa Enoki, not as an accessory but as a primary mode of occupation. Rooms extend into covered terraces that feel like open-air living rooms.
Tropical materials connect these zones, reinforcing continuity underfoot and overhead while allowing breezes to move freely through the house. Paths thread between volumes and vegetation so that movement from one platform to another brings shifts in temperature, scent, and sound. Everyday routines unfold along this gradient, from enclosed comfort to exposed lookout.
Landscape As Active Structure
Existing vegetation is not treated as backdrop; it remains an active part of the architecture. Mature trees shape volumes, terraces, and view corridors.
By minimizing intervention in the ground, the project keeps root systems and understory intact, which stabilizes the hillside and supports the local ecosystem. Shade from the canopy tempers solar gain, while the varied foliage filters views and introduces depth to the visual field. The house sits within a living framework that continues to grow and change.
As the day shifts, shadows from trunks and branches pool across platforms, tracing the structure’s relationship to the land. The residence reads as a careful insertion in a larger environmental story. Casa Enoki holds its line between forest and ocean, tuned to the contours, climate, and horizon that define this corner of Guanacaste.
Photography courtesy of QBO3 Arquitectos
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