is Portuguese for at ease, as you please — and it's the clearest way to explain what we were trying to build here.

We wanted a place where friends and family could actually spend time together — not pass through it but slow down in it. Built with as light a footprint as possible, and by hand wherever we could manage it. The walls are palm-plastered in the old Goan way, deliberately uneven, the same technique used in the hutments this coast has always built. The roof timber and furniture came from old Portuguese houses on Diwar island — salvaged rather than replaced, wood already shaped by a hundred years of Goan weather before we gave it a second life.

None of this was done to make a point. It's how a place gets built when you're doing it yourself, with people from around here, using what's already available rather than what's easiest to order.