Designing for the View: Why Every Room Feels Enormous
At Vkushty the site came first and the house second. How a 360° panorama over Sofia shaped everything — glazing that runs unbroken across the floors, the glass corners, the 3.39-meter clear ceilings, and privacy without a single curtain.
The Site Came First
Most houses are designed and then dropped onto a plot. Vkushty was designed the other way around. We started with the single most valuable thing the location offered — a 360° panorama over Sofia, with Vitosha rising behind — and asked what kind of house would do it justice. Everything that followed is an answer to that question.
The plot itself made the decision easy to protect. It's the last one in the Izgled Street urban plan, at its highest point, and no new construction is permitted to the east, south, or north. The view you wake up to is guaranteed to be the same in ten, twenty, or fifty years. When a view is that permanent, it's worth building the whole house around it.
Three Levels You Can't Read From Outside
The house is organized across three levels — one semi-underground floor and two above ground — but you'd never count them from the valley side. The Schüco glazing runs continuously across the floor slabs, so the joints between storeys vanish behind an unbroken plane of glass.
- The semi-underground level is set into the ground, but it's no dark basement: daylight is drawn in through an English court carved into the garden, so the lower floor still looks out rather than in. It holds the garage, gym and guest suite.
- The main living floor, above ground, sits where the panorama is at its best, and the whole floor is organized around it.
- The upper floor lifts the bedrooms to the widest, most uninterrupted version of the view.
Because the glass wraps past the slabs instead of stopping at each one, the two above-ground floors read from outside as a single continuous volume of glass. It makes the house look larger than its floor count suggests — a little like the clean glazed skin of a modern office building, but warmer — and, frankly, it looks superb.
Two Directions, Two Views
The house looks both ways. Its main Schüco facade faces north, toward the lights of Sofia; the south side opens to the private garden and pool, with Vitosha rising behind. Designing for the view here meant giving each room the outlook that suits it — the city, the garden, or both.
- The living and dining space is the room that gets both. It's a single open volume of nearly 80 m² where full-height Schüco glazing meets in frameless glass corners — Sofia to the north, the garden to the south. There's no post in the corner to interrupt it; a view wraps around you whether you're at the table or on the sofa.
- The kitchen faces south, over the garden and pool — so cooking happens looking at greenery, not a backsplash.
- The master suite also faces south, opening to the calm of the garden with the mountain behind rather than the city — the quiet side of the house, kept for rest.
- A children's bedroom takes the north outlook instead, waking up to the Sofia panorama.
3.39 Meters of Ceiling
A wall of glass only becomes architecture at the right proportions. The living and dining spaces are built to a clear height of 3.39 meters — 3.75 meters floor to floor, with the slab inside that figure — so the glazing reads as a genuine glass wall, not a tall window. We quote the clear height because that is the one you stand under; the floor-to-floor number is always the flattering one. That height does two things: it lets far more daylight reach deep into the plan, and it gives the panorama room to breathe. Standing in the room, the view feels like part of the space rather than a picture hung on it.
Privacy Without Curtains
The usual objection to all this glass is privacy. The answer here isn't blinds — it's elevation and orientation. The houses sit high on the hillside, facing outward over a protected valley with no construction permitted across the view and few, distant neighbors within a gated community. The glass looks at Sofia and the mountain, not at anyone looking back.
That's the quiet luxury of designing for the view from the first line: you get to live inside the panorama, with the lights on, and never reach for a curtain.
For a room-by-room walk through one of the homes, see Inside House #3 — A Glass Home Above Sofia.
Explore the Vkushty houses or request the blueprints and 3D tour.