Text description provided by the architects. Marea is a multi-family development on the Mediterranean just outside the city of Batroun, one of the oldest cities in the world. Our project investigates density by combining an approach towards shared circulation and infrastructure with the construction of private terraces featuring extraordinary views.
Owner Chafic Saab’s concept for the site was to embrace a radically different approach to development in Lebanon by creating a multi-family housing project in which building sizes vary from very small studio apartments to duplexes, combined houses, and stand-alone villas. In 2017, WORKac was hired to at first conceptualize and ultimately design the project. WORKac’s response was to embrace density in housing and celebrate the variety of housing unit sizes while also ensuring that each would get the best possible view of the Mediterranean. The land has a textured history. During the Syrian occupation, it was used as a Syrian army camp, and then left abandoned in 2005. Saab recalls walking the half-demolished site after the Syrian army’s withdrawal, having left behind concrete blocks, rusted steel, plastic tents, tires, and garbage bags. Yet throughout all of this destruction, the view of the Mediterranean remained, sparking a feeling of optimism and the possibility of a new life in this spot.
At the time of Saab’s initial visit, Batroun was largely ignored, considered a long distance from Beirut (especially given the psychology of crossing into what was once occupied territory), and less than desirable for development as most people bought summer residences in the mountains, rather than at the seashore. Over the past fifteen years, however, and due in great part to Batroun’s energetic mayor, the area started to become more desirable, and tourism increased. The project was a true collaboration between client and architect. Chafic Saab lived on site for three years to oversee the construction of the project and has since completion continued to make it his permanent home
Marea is also an attempt to capture what is so magical about Lebanon: the incredible range of landscape, most visible in the compression from mountain to sea. As such, the project was conceived as bringing together landscape and architecture, with the vista of triangulated green roofs suggesting an undulating topography that descends towards the sea, architecturally mirroring that geographical compression. Marea's sixty units are organized in four terraced rows that step down a steep slope to the beach, featuring smaller studios at the top and progressively larger dwellings—townhouses, then semi-detached houses, then individual houses —on the lower tiers. The diversity of unit types all feature unobstructed views and each owner enjoys access to the public beach through a series of ramps, stairs, and streets that connect the units.
While architecture merges with landscape, the landscape also becomes architecture. The houses are set in a complex geometry of planted, triangulated folds, creating the "streets," wooden patios, swimming pools, and lush planting beds. Vehicular circulation is relegated to golf carts - or an underground network of parking combined with space for freshwater cisterns and storage behind and beneath the geometric landscape.
Even with the site’s high density, the units have substantial privacy. Every unit features a double-height living space that opens onto a private patio (or to a roof deck for the upper units) with either a private or shared swimming pool. Within the site, residents circulate along the tight streets that cascade down the sides of the site and between the blocks of villas. As in a classic Mediterranean hill town, neighbors stop to chat or wave hello as they make their way through the constructed landscape.
Despite the tremendous overlapping crises that the country has faced since 2020, Marea is now fully occupied and has become a thriving community with some residents living there full time, as well as a model of how density in urban development can succeed in fostering a sense of collectivity and community while still maintaining individual difference and privacy. Its shared restaurant on the beach has become a destination for people from all around the country, giving an even more urban character to the streets and passageways in the evenings.
