An open floor plan can make cooking, reading, and catching up with friends feel pleasantly connected. It can also leave you with nowhere to withdraw short of closing a bedroom door. Georgy Kostrov’s Villa in the Forest by the River addresses that familiar tension with changing floor levels, looping routes, and places to pause. He’s designing it as his own home in Russia’s Moscow Region.
The 2026 project is still in progress, and the perspective images are AI-assisted visualizations, not photographs of a finished house. That distinction matters with a proposal this atmospheric. Dark, angular roofs rise among the trees, while glass walls face the wooded slope beside a river. The ambition is to accommodate solitude, everyday life together, and entertaining without making every change of mood require a separate room.
Designer: Georgy Kostrov
I like that the layout treats those needs as different settings rather than competing lifestyles. Floor and ceiling heights distinguish areas within the connected interior, while a circulation loop allows movement indoors, onto a terrace, and back by another route. In principle, that gives someone more choices than sitting in the middle of everything or leaving entirely. The steps also raise a practical question: how easily will everyone navigate these routes?
The exterior makes a similarly deliberate choice. Kostrov keeps the road-facing side more enclosed and opens the shared spaces toward the forest with glazing, terraces, and steps. That seems a sensible hierarchy: passing traffic gets less access to domestic life, while the trees become the view. In the renderings, slim window frames give the broad glass surfaces a rhythm.
The roofline is the most assertive part of the design. Its uneven peaks could easily read as architectural theater, but Kostrov connects the shape to rooflights, ventilation, and proposed modular assembly. I’m more persuaded by that explanation than by an abstract claim about mimicking trees. The silhouette has a job to do, even if the construction process still needs to prove itself.
Light also helps distinguish places without putting up another partition. The project description positions rooflights above separate activity areas and uses colored glazing at the entrance to limit direct views inside. In the kitchen visualization, sunlight falls across timber cabinetry beneath a ceiling decorated with birds and foliage. I like the generosity of that ceiling. The room’s most expressive surface is overhead, leaving the kitchen itself visually grounded.
The proposed rooftop pond is the design’s biggest indulgence. Above the bathroom, water would refract daylight onto dark stone surfaces. The visualization shows a bathtub beneath a glazed opening, with lily pads visible overhead. It’s a lovely reversal of the usual skylight: looking up means looking through another little landscape. I’d want the engineering story alongside the image, particularly the provisions for waterproofing, cleaning, and winter conditions.
Elsewhere, the material palette gives each area its own character. Timber, terracotta, concrete, dark stone, slate, and water are proposed throughout. The warm kitchen rendering and shadowy bathroom suggest markedly different moods within the same house. Neither image proves how the materials will feel in use, but their contrast makes the spatial intention easy to read.
The outdoor lounge is the most sociable scene in the set: low, wraparound seating surrounds a stone fire feature, with a large projection screen facing it. I’d happily trade a conventional media room for that arrangement on a mild evening. Its appeal is straightforward. Everyone has a place to settle, and the forest remains visible around the screen instead of disappearing behind blackout curtains.
For all the drama of the roofs and the pond, the circulation interests me most. A home that lets people drift between company and quiet has a useful ambition beyond looking good in a rendering. Kostrov still has to turn these images into a workable building. The design’s real test will be whether those everyday choices remain as compelling as its bathtub ceiling.
